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The race is on amongst budget carriers – a race to the bottom, to see who can inconvinience passengers the most, in return for shaving off a few more bucks off the ticket price.
Budget Airlines – JetAmerica, RyanAir & Spring Airlines
JetAmerica, which started taking bookings for $9 flights with much fanfare in late May, was supposed to launch [...]
Written by Travel News on July 6th, 2009 with
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The race is on amongst budget carriers – a race to the bottom, to see who can inconvinience passengers the most, in return for shaving off a few more bucks off the ticket price.
Budget Airlines – JetAmerica, RyanAir & Spring Airlines
JetAmerica, which started taking bookings for $9 flights with much fanfare in late May, was supposed to launch on July 13. They’ve now postponed the launch to Aug 14. The reason for the delay is a lack of landing and take-off time slots at Newark.
JetAmerica’s VP of Operations Brian Burling says that the FAA flip-flopped on the need for time slots. He says they initially indicated JetAmerica wouldn’t need slots, but after the FAA found that JetAmerica had sold over 20,000 tickets even before the first flight had taken off, they changed their stance and now JetAmerica is grounded until they get the slots.
Of course, this leaves the 6,486 JetAmerica passengers who had booked tickets for dates in-between July 13 and Aug 14 in the lurch. JetAmerica is now refunding all of them, and offering to waive reservation charges if they re-book. This is what happens when you book cheap airline tickets with an airline which has no planes or crew and exists only on paper.
In Europe, cheapskate carrier RyanAir wants to leave no doubt that they’ll do anything to keep the prices down – even if it means leaving customers without a way to check-in. Last month, RyanAir announced a 10 hour downtime for their website, citing a need for essential maintenance.
RyanAir is also phasing out airport check-in desks as part of it’s cost-cutting measures, which basically means passengers can only check-in online. Which, of course, they can’t do if the website is down. This kind of catch-22 situation wouldn’t happen if the airline in question wasn’t going wild trying to save a few more dollars in any way possible.
But China’s first private airline and budget carrier Spring Airlines aims to go where no airline has gone before – They’re planning to get modified planes from Airbus with bar stools and safety belts, instead of seats. The plan is to offer standing-room tickets, and cram in 40% more passengers per flight.
Spring Airlines currently has 13 planes, and they’re not able to cope with the surging passenger volumes and demand for new routes. They’ve ordered 14 new jets, and if they get approval from the aviation regulator, the bar-stool planes could cut the airline’s costs by 20%, and allow them to offer lower prices to passengers.
How low can budget carriers go before consumers start weighing the merits of cheap tickets against inconviniences like cancelled flights, check-in problems and standing-room only flights? Apparently a lot more, judging by the 20k tickets sold by JetAmerica, and the 60 million passengers who flew on RyanAir in the 12 months to the end of June.
Assuming cheap carriers will always find customers, regardless of how bad the service is, should aviation authorities step in and draw a line somewhere?
Photo credits:- JetAmerica photo courtesy JetAmerica; Ryanair interior photo by Jon Gos via flickr (creative commons); Spring Airlines photo released into public domain by Follash.
Written by Travel News on July 6th, 2009 with
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