Cheapo Flying¶
989 words on Travel
I am fascinated with flying and I like going places (unless I’m wearing my eco-warrior hat, in which case I strongly advocate not even walking). And all these new ‘low-fares’ airlines really opened up new possibilities as I noted a while ago. Both by the style they use and by the flexibility you get. And, if you’re lucky, even in price.
When going with Ryanair, who now conveniently serve Bremen rather than just far-away airports, I keep having the impression that they deliberately want to look and sound a bit trashy just to remind you all the time that they are cheap. If the materials look cheap and the colours are horrific then it must have been a good price, right? Just looking at the way they do (or rather don’t) decorate their departure halls and their planes, suggests that getting something nicer looking would have just required some asking for it. Getting things that ugly might just be more expensive than doing them conventionally. But then the whole ‘spirit’ would be gone, I suppose.
And while their initial fares are quite good, they are approaching creepy oblivion step by step. Naturally, some hefty airport fees (say, just under €20 for Bremen to Stansted and just over €30 for Stansted to Bremen) will be added to the fare once you have selected your flights. And most of the times you will also be charged an extra fee for paying by credit card. And that charge won’t just be added once for the whole transaction but rather for each of the ‘tickets’. (I used to be able to evade that particular charge for flights booked from the UK by paying with my UK Switch card, but I’m not sure whether that is still true. It’s also a mysterious secret why only flights starting in the UK cand be paid in that way.)
But that’s far from it, they also started charging you for each piece of luggage you check in which apparently is cheaper when done while booking than it would be at check-in time (makes me wonder whether they just rent out the rest of the baggage hold to other people), they introduced ‘priority boarding’ as an additional chargeable feature, and they try to peddle some travel insurance while you’re at it. This makes booking a ticket a bit of a minefield as you really have to read all the fields and make sure that no extra unwanted charges are caused by their default values.
The next ‘improvement’ to Ryanair’s service, btw, will be that they’ll charge you for check-in at the terminal. Or, as their press release puts it, they’ll start doing free online check in for all flights
. It remains to be seen whether that check in charge will be part of the luggage charge. But I somehow doubt that and things will just add up and add up.
The next thing of course is the on board experience. You cannot recline seats and there are no magazine pockets. I find that acceptable for short flights. And not having the magazine pocket means seats can be closer together (or a centimetre of extra space for my legs, depending on whether or not you’re an optimist).
Without the magazine pocket they needed a new place for the safety instructions which they just stick on the back of the seat in front of you. Very efficient, I have to admit. Both at keeping you informed and at keeping the possibility of a crash fresh in your mind (not a problem for me, but I can see people not appreciating that).
It appears that the typeface used for those safety instructions is proper Helvetica (wouldn’t Arial have been another nice and subtle way to communicate cheapness?), although I wonder whether it really is the best thing to read in an emergency. But then again, I wonder whether the somewhat artificially rough dot-screen style they use for their printing and the many raster points on the instructions (rather than using exactly matching colours) help readability. To me they just make these presumably vital instructions harder to decipher.
So that is quite amusing. And with a whole flight’s time to look at it, you’ll be delighted to see that they actually are honest about how close the seats in front of you will be to you and that bending down to your knees for a ‘brace’ position will not be possible. You’ll also be amused that you’re asked to remove earrings, dentures and glasses in the case of an emergency landing. That will give a few funny scenes when the old ladies can’t leave the plane after they removed their dentures because the guy in front of them can’t find the way out without his glasses. Fun!
Another thing I found somewhat questionable is the way in which they used pre-recorded safety announcements. It appears that the newer 737 planes have their life-vests above your seat rather than beneath it. The plane and also the safety information in front of you is labelled that way. But the recording, which is probably the same on all their planes contained sentences telling you that the life vest is either beneath your seat or above you and asking you to find out where it is (before telling you that it’s forbidden to remove any of them and it’s a criminal offence to do so). If that information is vital – as decades of playing those messages to people suggest – it shouldn’t be full of conditionals. There should be a straightforward message that suits the plane it is played in.
Another thing I noticed was this:
Look at the over wing emergency exits indicated on the plan. Going by that, how far do you think they’re apart? and is that the same as this:
If graphics are important, they should communicate their message clearly. And I do miss that clarity in these graphics.
