Slow Going At Iberia Airways

I read only yesterday that demand for Iberia Airways had slowed. How serendipitous it was that I was sat in Barcelona Airport enduring a delay at the hands of the same airline.

The two things may have been an unfortunate happenstance but taken with my experience of flying out with people over-packed in a small departure area at Gate 11 in Heathrow Terminal 3, getting onto a heaving plane and taking off an hour late, perhaps it is the norm for the airline. On board, everything is chargeable and although the flight attendants are invariably polite, handsome or pretty, it doesn't make up for the fact you are shelling out a whacking €2.50 for a tomato juice.

The return journey had all the hallmarks of a smooth event. I arrived early-ish to see if I could get on the earlier flight. Iberia is one of the few airlines who actually will try to get you a seat on an earlier flight without laughing in your face and asking you to pay a bank bail out figure for a new ticket as BA does. They tried, but the flight was full. I thought to myself that the Telegraph clearly does not know what it is talking about when it comes to demand. But the Barcelona-London route is incredibly popular.

In the week, I had to arrange a flight to Barca, then on to Madrid and back to London. Iberia came out as over £900 for the itinerary. I costed it up using Easyjet for the out and inbound legs and it was half the price. Iberia clearly have a price problem as they are competing against budget airlines but trying to pass off their service as premium.

So sitting at Barcelona airport yesterday I noted that all the Easyjet flights got away on time and that many Iberia flights were half empty to destinations like Lyon and Bordeaux. So when a London flight was called, I duly queued only to find that in fact I was in the line for the earlier flight to London which should have taken off two hours before and was turned away for obvious reasons. Reassuringly, our flight was called next and it seemed to be maybe just a few minutes late only. We got aboard the bus to take us, having had our boarding cards torn or the copies taken, passports were checked and on we went. The bus did a languid circuit before arriving at the plane and the two pilots could be seen doing their checks in the cockpit. The bus stayed outside, doors firmly shut and pumping humid air into the passenger compartment. The notion was dawning that something was wrong. A lady in a yellow jacket walked down the steps, muttering into her walkie-talkie, struggling to put on her sunglasses to look more officious and conferred with our driver. Without a word, he nodded and we were driven back to the gate and the doors opened and, like condemned sheep at the slaughterhouse, we disembarked without a single word uttered to any of us. When inside the gate we learned that the pilot was not actually checking his instruments but more likely barfing into a bag as he had come over all sick. Or perhaps it was a ruse as he had tickets to a bullfight or whatever, or was on a promise.

We were told that a new pilot would be found - relax, they are an airline after all so they should have plenty. We sat back in our places and waited a while. Then the chaos started.

An announcement told us that the flight was now delayed until 18.45 which was over a two hours delay. People were disgruntled but slowly began to disperse and I went upstairs, found a bar and sat down with my paper, a packet of peanuts and a frothy cerverza. I had munched the bag of peanuts and taken two sips of the amber nectar when an announcement, barely audible above the hub-bub, told me that the flight was now delayed until 19.00. I sat back and sipped my beer, called my wife and tried to chill out.

Minutes, later, maybe half a pint's worth, an announcement told us that the flight was ready for boarding. It seemed we were getting away no more than an hour late at this rate. I gulped down the half of beer I had left, picked up my bags and went to the gate where a small throng of people had accumulated but was suspiciously, and markedly, smaller than the original number that had tried to get on the flight. After several more sweaty minutes, the buses arrived and we had the daft charade of staff trying to work out who we were from the remains of our boarding passes; the security guys just wafted us past without looking at our passports and we got on the bus. Someone told me that a pilot had arrived from Madrid and was, I assume, about to knock off but was told to take the plane to London and back. It's hardly the same as asking a taxi driver to do one more fare, this was a 4-6 hour round trip. I didn't even think about whether his inbuilt tachometer had enough hours left, the instinct to get home was strong. We all boarded and there were chaotic scenes as a family seated around me found that there were already people in their places. A farcical game of musical chairs was played and the poor chap who lost just stood there like a lemon holding his boarding card stub with a face like a slapped backside thinking, 'What about me?'. He was duly whisked off the business class which he seemed consoled about until he realised it was two small rows at the front with a curtain behind it.

Amid all the confusion, three things struck me. One, my row was empty except me. Two, there seemed to be far less people on the flight that had originally queued and three, a rather annoying tape of music was playing of really drab music sung by the likes of Katie Melua. An announcement proclaimed that indeed, passengers had dispersed across the acreage of Barcelona airport and many could not be found - we were 24 short and could not take off without them. The tape whined on, louder if anything.

We waited with increasing agitation for the missing people as the tape played on and you could feel a Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch brewing. People arrived and there was more confusion as another family arrived to try and sit exactly where the first family had displaced the original occupants of the rows around me. Once more there was a game of musical chairs ending in the bizarre situation of one family being split by the other - how they could not have been rearranged simply so that each sat together seemed beyond the pretty airhostesses, but organisation was not to be their strength.

The first fuse blew a few seconds later, as a pompous grey-haired Englishman threw down his Blackberry in rage and screeched for the music to be turned off. He had peaked too early - the pilot simultaneously announced that due to the late arrivals we had missed our take off slot and now had to wait until 19.40 to get away. Given we had started to board at around 18.15, this was a long time to spend on the plane in the turgid heat, listening to the moaning music. Tempers were starting the fray.

The pompous man pressed his call button for the first time and the hostess arrived swiftly. He demanded to know why we were late. She explained in clipped English that passengers had thought that the plane would not take off until 19.00 and so had gone to eat and clearly had not heard the new announcement. Fortunately, everything was running so late that when they came down to board for the time they thought they had to, we were all waiting for them. He was particularly dissatisfied and started a rant about the fact that no one had offered any free drinks or a sandwich, which was a fair point, and it may be sensible to crack open the bar with some freebies to keep the punters happy. She smiled sweetly and said she needed higher authorisation and the man replied, 'Who? The bloody Pope?'

This final remark was returned with a frosty glare and his card had obviously been marked. I mentally noted to myself that if I were him, I wouldn't order a sandwich tonight as visions of 'Road Trip' and french toast came to mind. He chanced his arm at one last thing before the hostess retreated - could she change the damn tape as it was driving him crackers. She smiled and said yes and left. She did not change the tape, if anything, I could have sworn it got louder as some fool droned out a cover of 'What a Wonderful World' for what seemed the nth time.

We sat and waited for the take off slot and mercifully the captain managed to get the air conditioning to work and an ominous vapour appeared above the overhead lockers as fresh, cool air was pumped into the stuffy cabin. The pompous man started nattering his complaints to a general audience, none of whom spoke back or looked at him. He was now openly declaring it would be the last time he flew on Iberian and I could feel the share price almost plummet as he spoke. And the tape was now, he made clear to us all, 'Doing my bloody head in.' He had a point - the damn thing was now playing, for at least the third time, a saxophone version of 'Hark the herald angels sing' which was highly inappropriate, and awful, given the stifling humidity of the cabin. I realised that I had heard the very same tape on the flight over and the whole jigsaw of why Iberian were suffering lower passenger manifests was now dawning on me. The service was rubbish and the music was crap.

At precisely 19.15, for no apparent reason and without warning, the captain started his engines and we trundled off from our position. He came on the intercom and said that we were still on for a 19.40 take off but he would hold at a point to wait his turn at the end of the runway and it might be useful in case we were given an earlier slot. I liked his style while mentally trying to calculate how much precious fuel that might burn in doing so and approximately what tonnage of CO2 we might be unnecessarily pumping into the atmosphere but erased the thought as the lure of getting home and having a cold glass of wine and a shower was far too strong.

We got to our holding point and, as if the pilot had seen a gap in the traffic, we rapidly turned onto the runway and, again without any warning, we gunned our engines and we were hurtling down the runway at a rate of knots, giving the air crew just enough time to stow their accessories from the safety demo and get to their seats. We were airborne in short order and still the music droned on above the scream of the engines as the plane sought height with the City lights to our left, the sea to our right and turbulence all around us. The skipper announced he had got clearance to go - which was a relief to us all as I had visions of some other captain shouting into his radio, 'Oi, stop that man. That's my take off slot,' or worse - and he said that the expected flight time would be one hour and fifty minutes but he would see if he could shorten that. Whether his Sat Nav allowed the selection of shortest and fastest routes, I don't know, but maybe he knew a short cut across the Bay of Biscay or he was just going to keep the throttle at maximum. I opened my book while nervously hoping that he was keeping a close eye on that fuel gauge after all.

The inflight service is rubbish on Iberia. I actually bought a sandwich combi which included a beer. The beer was fine, the sandwich dry and tasteless and all for €9.50 which would have made Michael O'Leary slather with excitement. The pompous man was moaning about free drinks but did not mention the Pope again, although he did once more ask if the tape could be changed or turned down. Again the staff smiled and nothing further was done about it. The families around me snored quietly despite the bumpy ride and before we knew it, we were descending toward Heathrow. Of course, as we had evidently nicked someone else's slot across France, we had arrived early and we were sent to detention in a holding pattern somewhere near Croydon as we flew repeatedly over the 'twenty pence' building by the station at East Croydon. The music had been turned up as part of the landing preparations and now the pompous man was scrunched up in his seat with his eyes shut and fingers placed in his ears. Every now and then he would take them out and shout, 'This effing music is doing my head in,' to which a lady near by said, 'Just effing ignore it like the rest of us.' The retort was a mistake as clearly he wanted to engage someone in the argument and he berated her for the poor service, delays, and rubbish music as if the lady owned the airline. She took it all pretty well before calmly saying, 'I hope you feel better for getting that off your chest. Sadly, for you, I can do bugger all about it so just shut up.' I was waiting to join in the round of applause but there was none so I just pretended I was clapping along to the music.

When we finally got on our approach, the plane was blown all over the place with the engine pitch going up and down like a dentist's drill. Looking out of the window I was sure we were being blown off course or would land upside down - if we had any fuel left. But as always, just feet above the runway, the air seemed clear but it did not stop the captain from putting down the plane with a huge thump, on one wheel. As soon as he got the second down, the nose went down with a mighty bang and the brakes were applied very heavily. The music went up several decibels and we were back at someone's monotonous version of 'Clouds' which the pompous man screamed at.

More chaos ensued as the plane stopped short of its parking position and several Koreans leapt to their feet to retrieve their bags from the overheads. One locker opened and a laptop bag, complete with laptop inside, dropped out and bounced off the side of a man's head. The Korean was unrepentant while the man rubbed his head in bewilderment - if only it had been the pompous man. It was clear several people had connecting flights to places like Korea, New Zealand and Australia but there were no announcements about priorities or that there were staffing waiting - it was every man for himself. Duly, the pompous man bellowed into his phone that his driver was to take him for an 'effing curry' and he got his bag and started barging his way down the plane. At this point, I had had enough as he was distressing an Indian gentleman who was trying to herd his kids in the cramped space ahead of me. I made myself 'big' which is difficult for a small chap but all those years of rugby finally paid off. The man attempted to get past but I just stood my ground.

'Some of us are in an effing hurry,' he said, possibly to whoever was on his Blackberry as he still had it to his ear. I ignored the comment. He then began pushing, while still jabbering into his phone. I stood still - the kids were delaying us all but I didn't care as I deliberately waved people ahead of me to carry on. Pompous man lost it. 'I said I was in an effing hurry,' he said to the back of my head as if I cared.

We finally got off the plane and as we were on the jetway, pompous man tried to overtake. I blocked his line skillfully and he really got angry as he told whoever was on the phone that he would call back. 'What's your problem?' he demanded of me, as he tried to struggle past. 'The kids on the jetway don't need to get run over by people like you or listen to your language, mate. Just grow up and wait your turn,' was my terse reply.

He wasn't impressed, then again that wasn't the aim. He waited for his opportunity at the end of the jetway and then stormed past mouthing something to himself which clearly made him feel better. The glorious moment came when we got to Passport Control. There were literally thousands of people in a massive queue going back out of the hallway. Pompous man barged his way through to the Fast Track lane and he literally sprinted down it. We all slowly made our way into the normal section where a sign said '25 minutes wait from this point'. Minutes later, pompous man was being led back in angry conversation with an immigration official who was telling him that the black restrainer he had ignored was to show that Fast Track was closed. As pompous man tried to blend into the queue way ahead of the end, a rather burly bloke next to me put an arm out and said, 'Go to the end, smart arse - I've had enough of you for one night.' In splendid slow motion, he was led away by the official toward the back of the huge queue stretching all the way back almost to our jetway. It was the last I saw of the idiot.

But my focus on the pompous man served a purpose. I could have been pompous man with great ease. I usually get very uptight about airline service and delays - more specifically the lack of information. In this instance, the information had not only been lacking but the little that did come out was conflicting, causing further, unnecessary delays. Iberia should have laid on a few drinks or food vouchers, there were a lot of kids on the flight and they must have been hungry and thirsty by the time we took off, some three hours late. There is no excuse for poor or no communication and it is the single most irritating thing about air travel. You expect it of Ryan Air and Easyjet as they have the mind set that 'what you don't pay for, you don't get' and with them service is certainly that, respect is another. But Iberia are not low budget and they are not cheap.

So if Iberia Airways has a problem on demand then last night's performance will not have helped as there were many on the flight who vowed never to use them again - I dare say pompous man was one and I was certainly another.

One last comment on the joys of international travel - what on earth was happening at Terminal 3? Going out on Wednesday was bad enough as the terminal was crowded to the gills and the departure gate seating far too small for the manifest of people for the aircraft which took an age to check through. But passport control was a shambles coming back last night, with at least a thousand people queuing and very few positions manned. When they did, eventually, open up a couple more positions, the staff then blatantly took an age to check each passport, almost inviting the inevitable rudeness they got from several people. The queuing system was shambolic as well with people shoving and moving around and no actual lines formed. Contrast this to somewhere like the US where there are regularly large volumes of people to be checked, there are always well organised lines and people to direct you, however officious and sour-faced they may be.

Heathrow is decending into a mess and depsite a brand new terminal being built to ease the loads on the others, it has got far, far worse. It is not a pretty sight for foreign travellers arriving, it's chaos for EU arrivals and it has nothing to do with more rigorous checks - it is simply lack of staff at peak times and slow systems that take around 30 seconds to check a home country passport.

That, at least, cannot be blamed on the luckless Iberian Airlines.

The Glamour of International Travel

As I sit in alone in a small room in Barcelona, where I have somehow damaged the airconditioning switch so that I am inside a medium sized refrigerator when the outdoor temperature is 25 degrees, I am once again pondering what's good about international travel.

A young American lady sitting across the aisle on the plane over told me that she was spending 4 months in Spain and was looking forward to it. I agreed - it was a great adventure. She asked me how long I would be in Spain and I replied one night. After a day in meetings, I was to spend a night in the hotel and then another morning of meetings, then plane home. I must have done this a hundred times in the last year, it seems, and I cannot remember the last time I actually kicked back and had a moment to myself to enjoy some of the spectacular cities I have visited, from Rome to Stockholm to the inside of Copenhagen airport only. I lie. Now that I think of it, I did manage a trip around the harbour of Hamburg in an open top boat, breathing diesel fumes, sun beating on my head and sweating profusely in a suit. I saw several scrap heaps, empty dry docks and Roman Abramovich's new yacht covered in plastic - and all the while I kept glancing at my watch worrying that I would be late for my meeting.

The day had not started well. Due to travel costs, the cheapest flight got me to Barcelona just 40 minutes before my meeting, cutting it all very fine. The plane was packed so full that there was nowhere near enough room in the departure lounge, let alone on the aircraft, for us all to comfortably sit. It was fashionably, but bloody annoyingly late - by well over an hour and so my slim margin of error was already burnt away before I started, causing one of those stupidly fractious journeys where I felt like going onto the flight deck and telling the pilot to put his foot down. How he would have laughed and either shot me as a terrorist or pointed to the throttle as being a lever not a pedal.

In the cost consious era of business travel, I found myself in the section called 'Basic' as classified by Iberia Airways - a euphemism for 'abattoir class'. This is a level that makes Ryan Air look like the Orient Express. A mere tomato juice cost €2.50, rivalling any of O'Leary's rip offs. The good news was that they do not charge extra for check in, bags, jetways or fast queuing - just get to the front and stand up quickly. And you get a real seat allocated to you beforehand. That made the return flight to Barcelona exactly half what I paid for a recent Ryan Air one way trip from Frankfurt-Hahn airport to Stansted. Oh yes, believe me - Ryan Air advertise cheap flights but I paid, with check in, priority boarding and one tiny bag in the hold, exactly double the price to go for a flight double the distance to Barcelona, both ways. One other, nit-picking point - Frankfurt-Hahn airport is around 200km from Frankfurt, and is a god forsaken hell-hole infested by more flies than a festival of rancid horse manure. Granted it was hot but even I couldn't see the waitress in the small cafe for the fog of flies in the room. Some of us think London Luton is stretching the imagination, but this is like calling Birmingham Airport a London airport.

Whenever I mention what I do or where I go, it always sounds good that I have been to Germany last week and Spain this week etc. But when you sit like 'Billy Nomates' alone catching up on the day's emails and messages with a motley room service sandwich half eaten at your side and only two channels with English on and both are boring business news running the same endless loop, it really is not as glamourous as it sounds.

Tomorrow is 28 degrees in Barcelona - I am only hoping the office I visit has good ventilation or else it will be another day in a sticky shirt, preying for a shower. Hands up all those who know what I'm talking about.

No Flying Sandwiches

It is a dark day when BA announces that it is banishing the free meal from its short haul flights.

I use the term 'meal' loosely as I am referring to the dreaded BA sandwich. I mean, it wasn't as if it was gourmet fare anyway but to take away perhaps the last bastion of differentiation between the national carrier and low-cost, no frills airlines is close to rock bottom. It seems also to be the limit of the creative thinking of an increasingly beleaguered CEO, Willie Walsh.

True, by banishing the rather poor sandwich and chocolate tit bit from flights after 10.00am (fear not, breakfast on flights before 10.00am remain reassuringly unaffected by this callous measure) that last less than two and a half hours saves the struggling airline £22m which cannot be overlooked. However, when passengers start making comparisons with other or low-cost airlines you have to start thinking, what is the difference?

I have to say I am no fan of Ryan Air. Until recently, you had to queue endlessly at Stansted in order to get checked in but they have now introduced online and electronic check in at the airport. Somewhat strangely, but typical of Ryan Air, you pay for the privilege of checking yourself in. In fact, you pay for everything. By the time you have added the whole thing up, if the bare fare was not as low as £3.99 then you may as well book a flat fare with BA.

You think I'm kidding? No way.

If you travel with a bag to check in and particularly if the bag carries more than a toiletry bag and a few items to wear, then you are looking at excess baggage charges which themselves are excessive. You can easily start paying Ryan Air some distance over a BA airfare. When you start adding in the fact in most cases you get rained on when walking to the aircraft because they are too stingy to afford renting jetways and that you cannot get the seat you want unless you pay more for the most idiotic and useless 'priority boarding' system which is policed by nobody, then you start to realise why O'Leary and his shareholders are making such excellent profits.

The trick for low-cost airlines is simple volume. There is no point in buying and flying expensive aircraft if you cannot utilise them to the full. So each plane is flown as many times a day as it can fit in, so the shorter the distance of the flight, the better. And it is turned around as fast as it can at each destination while the number of seats occupied each flight should be as high as possible, which is where the price gimmickry comes from. It is a recipe for over crowded planes and low service levels but 67m will fly Ryan Air alone this year which is 15% up from last year. And they are not alone with Easyjet in hot pursuit.

The key to success is the explosion of routes. Between Easyjet and Ryan Air, the number of interesting new places to visit has grown enormously over the last 10 years. We may laugh that we often get our imaginations stretched as to what constitutes a flight to Stockholm or Brussels but by and large the routes are superb. Take flying to Valencia as an example. It is one of the largest cities in Spain, just 100km from the northern edges of 'Britville' holidays, it hosts some of the biggest conferences in Europe, the Americas Cup in 2007 and in a few weeks time it will host the F1 Grand Prix of Europe on a superb street circuit - it is also home to one of the best football teams in Europe. Try flying there by either BA or its partner, Iberia, and you are looking at a two flight hop costing a minimum of £700. Or you can choose a direct flight with either Easyjet or Ryan Air. Even when you get to the low-cost airlines, choice is crucial. Easyjet was almost twice the cost of Ryan Air, and it only flies once a day to the destination. Ryan Air won hands down.

This year, as a supporter of London Wasps rugby club, I hope to take in at least one of their away European games. I have been to Paris, Biarritz and Treviso to support them in the past but they have also played at several southern French and northern Italian towns only accessible by low cost airlines. Then there are the people who either buy or rent holiday homes - imagine the ability to simply hop for a long weekend to a home near Perpignan?

And there is the business element. With premium cabins like Club Europe faltering, I cannot think why I would choose BA to fly short haul these days. Luton Airport is just 25 minutes up the road from me, the parking is cheaper and the terminal is fine. Easyjet and Ryan Air fly regularly to Paris, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Manchester and Amsterdam as well as a variety of other major cities combining convenience and low-cost for the business traveller, particularly if you are away only a short time. Stansted is not bad either - apart from places like Valencia, it was my only access point to fly to Montpelier when working for a company with an HQ down there previously. Heathrow, for anyone north of London is almost inaccessible with the M25 widening roadworks set to be with us for the next 3 years (yes, I am serious) and then short term parking is so costly and far away from the terminals to render the whole process a nightmare.

The formula for budget airlines may indeed be spartan but you have to admit they have seriously taken BA to task. The stuffy, backward airline pinned so much of its hopes on Terminal 5 only to see all the access it has built to the terminal bottlenecked by a seriously congested motorway network. And then, what the hell happened to the airconditioning at Terminal 5? It is is built with so much glass that it's like a greenhouse whenever there is more than a few rays of sun, making the whole travel experience a rather unpleasantly sticky affair. Also, knowing what we now know about airport security and the time, hassle and inconvenience it adds to a journey, why on earth did they plan the entrance into the airside area of the new terminal so badly? I am even leaving out the most disastrous piece of project management I have witnessed in a while when they actually commissioned the new terminal.

Yet on soldiers Willie Walsh. I don't know what photos he has of Board members and big shareholders, but they must be pretty compromising for him to still be in a job. He has happily presided over the most incredible swing of profitability to major loss in a single year that has been seen in the UK. In that time, all the major and minor flaws of the airline have been exposed and rather than making a huge shift in strategy and tactics at the airline, we are seeing it respond by imploring its staff to take salary holidays and axing the meagre meals on short haul flights. In small business terms, this is the equivalent of not buying fresh flowers once a week for reception or axing the monthly staff pizzas - both of which I have personally done in response to poor performance and in both cases I saw a disproportionate drop in staff morale and a decrease in my managerial credibility as a result.

Willie Walsh has a further problem. Getting rid of the monthly pizzas for me got me bad press within my company - for Walsh, this is national news. Many years ago as a trainee salesperson at Hewlett-Packard, the free biscuits for staff were rescinded as part of a global cost cutting measure. You may as well have asked staff to take a pay cut or axe the annual staff bonus - it was taken that seriously internally. But Walsh's actions are public and customer facing. Taking away the motley sandwich was part of the service and cost of a ticket. By saving £22m publicly he is not taking the same amount of the price of tickets. He is also announcing that the cost of the sandwich was trivial compared to the price of the ticket as £22m spread across each ticket sold is pennies.

We were paying a premium for this particular sandwich, and now Willie Walsh has told us just how much of premium.

And that had been BA's flawed business model for some time. Without the profit at the front of spaces on the aircrafts, as premium passengers watch the pennies in these troubled times, the whole business of flying anybody from A to B becomes loss making to an airline like BA with such a massive cost base.

Cutting a measly sandwich is one of the few responses to the crisis of an idealess CEO. It also sends the worst possible message to its customers - "We were ripping you off for the cost of a sandwich".

BA needs far more than this to be a credible force of the future. Once, it dominated the landing slots in the UK and so stifled competition by being big. Virgin chipped away at that and brought innovation and service as well as price competition to BA at its two main hubs. Then the budget airlines came from left field. Instead of competing for slots at the national hubs, they picked off the subsidiary airports who were hungry to compete with Heathrow and Gatwick and there was no shortage of investment to support this - and certainly no shortage of customers to justify it.

In fairness to Walsh, the rot set in on BA a long time ago - and was compounded when they capitulated their own low-cost airline, Go, to Easyjet. But his woeful performance under pressure has contributed badly to the past mistakes and could possibly see BA lose its national carrier status in the not too distant future.

It will take a great deal more than losing a sandwich to make a difference at BA and far more focus will go on how they properly spend the extra £600m of cash they have recently raised. I would wager it will be the making or breaking of Willie Walsh in short order and, frankly, on his performance so far, I don't give him a chance.

Is Ryan Air In Dreamworld?

Low cost airlines like Ryan Air have done a lot to broaden our travel habits - and that's a good thing. But, boy, can they be bad, bad people when they want to be.

Although my first experience of what Ryan Air loosely called 'Stockholm Airport' was irksome - we landed at an old Air Force base some 100km from the outskirts of Stockholm and the lady picking me up was furious as she had travelled for ages to get there. The way back was even better - a bus from Central Station was the only way to get there. It cost a fair bit and there was only one bus, so passengers, luggage and whatever clogged all the seats and the aisle to bursting point and still left stranded passengers at the Station who never made it to the flight. Incredibly, not one of them got their money back.

We all know about the madcap plans to charge a) for using the toilet and b) by weight of passenger, but here is something even more loony and irrational.

We are flying to Valencia with some friends in a short time. They are a couple with a small child under 2. They booked their flights via Ryan Air today and got the adult seats for £17.99 each one way and £7.99 on the way back - sounds great. In a bizarre twist, the price for the small child, under 2, weighing little more than a feather, is £20 each way - more expensive than any of the adult seats.

Here's the rub - when on board, the air staff will insist that the child is seated on an adult's lap and strapped in. The more expensive fair for a young child does not even buy a seat - it actually subsidises one for another adult.

Micheal O'Leary says it's all about choice. That has little to do with choice, that is deliberate prejudice and discrimination against passengers with a young child. Ryan Air has form on picking on specific groups as we know if you are disabled or need assistance in anyway. They see disability and young kids as profit opportunities. That the child fare does not even buy a seat despite being more expensive than an adult seat is just outrageous.

Blinding With Science

Stelios and O'Leary always answer any criticism with elaborate mumbo-jumbo about load capacities and demand but the reality is that every seat on the flight is equal and there are no compartments for other classes. Getting on is largely on a first come, first served basis. So there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for charging more on the same flight for a child under 2 who does not even get a seat.

Let me run that by you one more time - NO EXCUSE. Some fancy lawyer will no doubt select the right part of law that governs the rights of the consumer, the individual, the human even if they are under the age of 2, but in my book it is outright discrimination and profiteering.

'Ryan Air, the low cost airline' should be replaced by 'Ryan Air, the high profit airline'.

Flying By The Pound

Fast on the back of ‘Whacky’ O’Leary’s proposal to charge Ryan Air customers for using the toilet, he is now considering charging passengers by their weight.

‘Don’t blame him, blame his customers’, is the message as this suggestion was put forward by 29% of the passengers who took part in an online survey organised by Ryan Air. Quite apart from the obvious ramifications legally about discrimination or human rights, there is also an implication of how this would be fairly implemented as surely height or age would have to taken into consideration.

However, I have yet to think all the possibilities through but there could be a way to mitigate charges. If a large person were charged heftily due to their weight, they might then invest some of their money in using the toilet facilities and then claim a refund as they weigh less after. In fact, if they were to use purgatives or induce sickness, then they could probably easily offset the toilet charge and get a good refund on arrival at the other end.

Conversely, for those who choose to drink excessively or eat on the plane, could they not be further charged, in addition to the costs of food and drink, for the additional weight they put on?
I have already registered a company which will trade in ‘Weight Offsets’ which will allow weight-challenged people to buy offsets and credits off less weight-challenged people and redeem them as vouchers to Ryan Air. It is already rumoured that there will be a Futures Market opened up on this which will be trading in actual weights vs forecast as, if someone buys a ticket in advance and weighs a particular weight, when they get to the check-in they may actually weigh more or less than the ticket they bought says. This way city traders can actually make a fortune gambling on the differences with all sorts of derivative products to trade ‘packages of weight’ and shorting those who are on diets but cheating, even 'spread betting' has a new meaning.

The possibilities are endless – particularly when Whacky O’Leary and his Ryan Air gurus are around.