Tuesday, April 03, 2007

The a la carte flying experience

It used to be that when the topic of Ireland's contribution to the global aviation industry came up, a nation could proudly point to the world's first duty free shop (at Shannon). But now a new achievement beckons, courtesy of Ryanair and Aer Lingus: an ever expanding self-parody of pay-for-everything flying. With ticket prices already quoted to exclude various taxes and "fees", and steep charges for what used to be within one's checked baggage allowance, Aer Lingus has one-upped Ryanair again and is imposing charges for pre-assigned seats. According to Tuesday's Irish Times (subs. req'd), the charge will be up to 15 euro (presumably 10 pounds) per flight, with pre-assignment of any seat costing at least 3 euro. The airline claims that there will still be an option to get any remaining seat at check-in, with no additional charge.

Now to a fundamentalist economist, this all perhaps sounds like ingenious extraction of value from something that the passengers want. But economists might be equally concerned with what this does to the notion of competition, which surely requires that the quoted price for a product actually mean something comparable across airlines. Increasingly for passengers dealing with the two airlines, it doesn't: the ticket "price" is a notional amount that when combined with the airlines' definition of taxes and fees gets you the worst seat on the plane, with no bags, but a free "not our fault" if anything does go wrong with the trip. Comparison shopping, made more difficult anyway by the de facto requirement to purchase from a proprietary website, is meaningless.

One might have thought that the Irish government, attuned to the costs of being on an island, would have a somewhat vigorous view on these antics. So far that's not the case.

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