Airlines in a Crisis

The Ryanair principle is all passengers are the same. However none of their basic principles seems so strong they can't be broken. Take the free seating. Fallen by the wayside. Single queueing always with families and they who needed help boarding first. Also gone. Anything to make an extra buck looks like their new way. Could this lead to a 2 or more class division of the cabin. After all full service airlines saw it as a cheap way of charging twice as much, or more, for the tickets. But when does it then stop to be a Low Cost and just becomes another full service with slightly lower fares. Norwegian is running a 2 class principle with more spacious seating in its premium cabin. But then it is more a Low Fare than a fully Low Cost competitor. Yes is tempting for those quite a few extra quid some are willing to pay for a little more be it space, food or service. But how much does it cost to have 2 sets of cabin standards, 2 types of meals and, 2 types of queues. And how distract

With the rule that the virus lives hours on the skin, days on cloth and a week or so on hard surfaces, I don't follow this obsession of cleaning planes, or even business premises, that no customer or staff have been in for weeks or months. It seems like cleaning have become the back to use virus mantra without rational thought for when and where it is needed. Dust yes, but just parking things for a couple of weeks is the ideal way of disinfecting it from viruses. With cleaning by hand it is more likely the cleaner bring new virus on board than that any have survived the last month. Bacteria is a different story. But then we are back to normal cleaning routines and not obsessive CoVid19 ones. And btw a simple cloth with a bit of disinfectant is not enough for a whole plane, or a store, or a hairdresser. After a certain point you are just smearing things around.

Airlines will hve to negotiate with insurance companies to come up with a soulution for that most travel insurances have been suspendd for the time being. If a solution could be found for that insurances sold with an airline ticket could have a certain minimum of cover also during these pandemic times, a lot more potential passenger would be reassured that they wouldn't just be abandoned to their own fate in some foreign country. This would of course include that airlines commit to arrange rescue flights if travel restictions will again be increased while people are away on a holliday. And that at a ticket price not overly goughing. Countries like Cyprus have shown the way forward by guaranteeing that a certain minimum amount of care will be given also to foreign CoVid19 patiens. Only if the different sectors within the travel industry come together with solutions and agreed on sharing the burdon can customers be entized back in numbers that will make things commecially viable

It is disapointing that Norwegian as one of only a few airlines in the world have not made a success of flying cargo with the 787. In these CoVid19 times the demand for cargo flights have been immense and many airlines with belly holds capable of taking air containers have been grabbing the chance to get some hard needed cash into the business. Some have even manually loaded cargo in the seats or temporarily taken the seats out for easier loading of both bagged and palletized cargo. All loaded through the normal aircraft doors. Why not Norwegian. It is not like Norway or the other places it used to fly to and between don't have airfreight needs. All we hear from the company is they can't do it profitably. Have the way they layed off people made it to difficult or expensive to take some back for possibilities. Including also constantly new openings for passenger flights. Is their cargo department to unimaginative when it comes to spotting, utilizing and negotiating deals th

Many of them are talking about how good their air conditioning are but would probably them selves not thrust sample a packed pub that relied on their ac instead of physical separation in CoVid19 times. They talked against temperature checks at airports unitl they discovered that that meant they themselves had to take action. Then they where all for it. Masks was unworkable until the only alternative was middle seat. All of a sudden the masks where the bees knees. While Joyce, Walsh, O'Leary, Wilson and others are again and again touting the same frase that nobody have been infected on a plane, they know at the same time that that the opposite would be difficult to prove without reasonable doubt. It would require you driving directly from a 14 day quarantine to the airport in a car by yourself and all the way to the aircraft stairs. Then doing the same in the other end. An impossibility. When listening to these characters you need to interpret every word as widely as possible. T

Airlines that don't supply masks free in CoVid19 times could let the demand for masks improve their income. Sell them at checkin and when they check at boarding that all passengers where masks they should at the same time offer them for sale. Also on board for they who need a replacment. Charge somthing that can easily be bagged and counted later. The mask itself is the receipt for they who asks. Since Lidl is charging 49 Euro for a pack of 50 masks I would suggest to charge 2 Euro per masks to passengers. Or 20 Nkr. Basically something round at a common coin size that can be easily collected handsfree and don't require change.

Take the analogy of going for a walk and you meet people that don't care about social distancing. You just know that if they are careless when you meet them they will be just as careless in other aspects of dealing with the spread.  Always choose a route where you are the one that controls the distance. Always choose an airline that has taken more precautions than the absolute minimum that won't cost them much. Smart travellers will make up their mind about what amount of precautions is necessary and will choose an airline that supplys them. However I'm not saying an airline, even a low fares one, couldn't cater for both. Instead of a class divider curtain they could have a CoVid19 precaution divider curtain. In front you get free middle seats, cleaning of toilets between each customer and cleaning of cabin between each flight. Behind, for a bit less money, you get nightly cleaning and shared armrests.

If your airline continues an albeit limited trolley service in CoVid19 times, it is important that your staff don't become super spreaders. They should of course wear masks and gloves. But the gloves  should also be cleanable so they can be treated with hand sanitizer between each customer. This hinders immediate transfers of viruses from the card/cash of one customer to the items of the next. Remember that virus stays alive for minutes on skin, hours on clothes but days on hard surfaces. In general, if you are doing to much with your hands to clean them constantly, just wear gloves and clean them. The same goes for they who are allergic to cleaning stuff or get sores from washing their hands to often.

Some airlines are singing the poor man tune to their staff at the same time as they are announcing postivity about the future to the stock markets. Can their eagerness to plead the crisis to get support and cheap loans from governments combine with the need to keep their share prices high to please owners and secure the share price their own bonuses and share options depends on. The Ryanair unions are certainly copping on to that not every thing is like it seems and telling the airlines management they can't have it both ways. Themselves agreeing only to a 1 year cut in their own salaries while saying to their staff that they must take a 5 year cut. https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-conornavirus-ryanair/unions-say-ryanair-exaggerating-covid-threat-to-undermine-conditions-idUKKBN22W1YZ This reminds me of how healthy a bonus the SAS CEO got out of negotiating down his staff terms and conditions while that airline was in a crisis a few years back. Even in a crisis the have

Let's take som quick math to Ryanair's O'Leary's claims that middle seat free is unsustainable. According to the Ryanair results presentation their average fare is 37 euro. Add 50% and it becomes 55.5 Still below Easyjet's current of 59 according to the same presentation. Will an extra 18 euro 50 cents really stop people from flying if it means they could be safer from viruses. It seems more of a pshycological problem for top brass rather than for any real economic reason, that airlines think they should be excempt from the physical distancing that every other business have to put up with. Some will always persist on squezing the last of capacity out of both materiel and staff, even at the cost of suffering, for others. The only thing a temporry 50% rise in ticket prices put an end to is O'Leary's plans about releasing a rush of Low Fares to get further market share from competitors, as long as they don't do just the same with borrowed money. I am su