Peter wrote:
So the lo-co formula cannot work other than by misleading people.
I don’t find anything misleading these days. I’ve paid tickets down to single digits (breakfast at airport was more expensive), up to several hundreds (of monetary units, no digits!) for a last minute ticket on a busy weekend.
All extras are fairly clear, and honestly these days even my recent experiences with BA / United show these companies adopted the same model. Yesterday, I was flying New Orleans to NYC (United) and the person at the gate was saying they were at capacity and couldn’t check bags, so they would be “removing bags and bodies” (sic) from the plane. Imagine the outrage if that happened on Ryanair!
I personally view a lot of the short haul travel as just a convenience. I’m sure for lots of people the commute home <→ work is worse than flying low cost, but they don’t seem to mind. I find people not rational, Ikea is loved (in my opinion for a much worse experience than flying in a low cost) with essentially the same concept of paying for extras. At least Ryanair (which even shares the same color scheme) doesn’t have us put the luggate in the hold, or drive the truck to the plane (well, probably because they wouldn’t be allowed).
I mostly travel with a backpack / don’t like airplane food (well, 30 years ago it could be good) / don’t drink on planes, so why should I sponsor the ones who do wish to do so?
On what I could see, Flag carriers (BA / United), have more expensive seat selections than the low costs (for routes of similar duration).
I do find Low costs have significantly improved the situation en europe: So many point to point routes are available (flag carriers tend to use hub and spoke), people can travel for less (people who couldn’t afford going abroad, or maybe just to Blackpool, can now go to nicer destinations).
The thing that really irritates me still is still (but that’s not necessarily specific to low costsr), trying to trick us into:
1) currency conversion – often just tries to trick you into doing the conversion for you
2) insurance (buttons / website design obviously made to lure you into purchasing)
It is highly non-linear in seats, size of fleet and routes, they also make a load of money in high margin extras (e.g. hotels, car rentals, free land, shops, food & beavrages…) but I agree the main core buisness is mainly there to loose money unless the last 60% expensive tickets pays for the first 40% super cheap ones (assuming they can fill the whole aircraft)
One problem is that when you take the DOC of say a 737 and divide it by the number of seats, you end up with a ticket price of something like 100 quid (or euros) to cover the costs.
So the lo-co formula cannot work other than by misleading people. The average ticket price has to be nearer to 200.
Irrelevant of GA but within a few days I read bankruptcy news for Germania and Flybmi plus difficulties of Norwegian and our ubiquitous Brianair.Does it have to do with accumulative maintenance costs ,on the ground of low money income of cheapo ticketing ?
I don’t know for a fact what is casuing it, but Michael O’Leary of Ryanair has been saying for a few months now that he expects to see a number of the smaller carriers go out of business due to increasing fuel prices affecting the industry.
We have that for quite some time. Kiel for example. Or Mannheim for some period of time. Or Magdeburg.
We now officially have medium sized cities with an airport, but no commercial airline serving them. Rostock, for example….
Name one industry, where a “race to the bottom” was healthy…
Irrelevant of GA but within a few days I read bankruptcy news for Germania and Flybmi plus difficulties of Norwegian and our ubiquitous Brianair.Does it have to do with accumulative maintenance costs ,on the ground of low money income of cheapo ticketing ?
what_next wrote:
Why they still failed to make a profit will always remain a mystery of our trade…
Unfocused business model with no clear strategy; fast yet opportunity driven growth; and ineffective cost management.
In the beginning, the bad management was unfortunate. In the end, the bad management was intentional.
I guess O’Leary is right when he says: it was a stitch up.
Fantastic. If they nail the AirBerlin crew, they will need to stonewall this crew. 
