Shut the ticket offices, leave your bag at home

In praise of Ryanair

The dissident right has a slightly miserable relationship with air travel. Rather than taking joy in their ability to jaunt across Europe at £30 a pop, they instead post pictures of 1950s aeroplanes they could never have afforded to use and proclaim, ‘we were never asked’.

This is false. All of Europe was asked millions of times a year if they wanted to pay for business class, and the good spendthrift Europeans took £30 from their wallets and handed it to Michael O’Leary, CEO of Europe’s leading low-cost airline. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry once opined that ‘air travel is cattle hell and no airline can turn a profit’. This is factually incorrect, in that Ryanair makes £120 a second, and the opinion is slightly laughable unless you believe yourself too ‘aristocratic’ to listen to two hours of Caribbean Rhythms in the air on your way to Poland.

Where the faux-‘aristocratic’ Right and ‘Issy’ (24 ans) from Clapham agree is that it is ridiculous that you be expected to pay for your right to bring a hairdryer in a 22kg suitcase for a week’s holiday on a beach. Whilst some may be unable to live without their amenities, the light travellers among us, such as Nicholas (25 ans), are more than happy to accept Mr O’Leary’s bargain as they browse SkyScanner. They are equally ready to check-in online before heading to a previously German post-Soviet town for a weekend. The needy throng of the British public essentially agree that this model is immoral: every summer, the BBC will provide a string of articles describing the misfortunes of old people and families travelling in Celtic FC football shirts being charged ‘outrageous’ fees for being unable to use an app.

While these fees are often decried as ‘hidden’ charges, it is abundantly clear what you are paying for at every single step of the booking process online, with frequent warnings that you have not paid to sit next to your friends or to bring along the aforementioned hairdryer. Indeed, the only people from whom the price of a bag or an in-person check-in are hidden are those who feign an inability to use the website, and show up to the airport with two pounds of makeup in a carry-on bag after their boyfriend books the lowest cost option for them.

This business model was not dreamt up out of sadistic glee. Ryanair largely just charges you for behaviours that are expensive for them to cater for. Charging to use the check-in desks is an obvious cost saver because if all the customers use the app, you don’t have to pay anyone to man the check-in desk, where staff do little else but use the app for the customer. The real game-changer is getting customers to stop bringing baggage by charging them for it. Ryanair (and their little brother WizzAir) thrash the competition in short-haul European flights by turning their jets around faster than anyone else. By emptying and re-loading their planes in twenty-five minutes rather than an hour, as is typical for lackadaisical flag carriers, Ryanair saves two hours every four flights, meaning they have two more hours to fly some more customers. In no small part this is because they are not wasting time carrying your hairdryers in and out of airports.

Business is ultimately predicated upon the ability to choose the services you sell, to whom you wish to sell them, and at what price point. This necessarily means there is some portion of the population that is too incompetent to bother dealing with unless they bring more money with them to get you to look after them. In this way, Ryanair is a model of human tolerance and fairness. They make available all the possible services that one might need, at the true cost of each service, while giving you as much scope as possible to adjust your own needs downwards by learning to be a better human.

Low-cost airlines are by no means the only enterprise governed by the model in which the able-bodied and sound of mind are rewarded for their convenience as customers. Take CostCo, the American chain of membership-only big-box warehouse club retail stores. CostCo is built on the backs of low time-preference marshmallow-test-passers who have demonstrated the ability to do two things: first, buy a yearlong membership for access to cheaper groceries, and second, be willing to buy groceries in large quantities on each visit.

What does this do for CostCo? Firstly, this cuts out people who steal. CostCo has one of the lowest shrink rates of any retail outlet because they are exclusively located in parking lots designed for people with big trucks who have a membership card to get past the security guard. It is also physically difficult to steal things as the goods are all packaged in bulk. As such, their stores are not liable to go the way of a walkable San Francisco CVS, which has a duty to allow anyone walking by to pick through the aisles. In addition to excluding those with no intent to pay, placing the stores in cheap industrial areas also excludes spontaneous or casual shoppers, thus leaving the spaces near the front door open only to more valuable customers. As a result of this — and also as a result of being very good value on the actual goods they sell — CostCo generates $1500 of revenue per square foot, roughly double that of Walmart.

By contrast, Britain’s railways are beset by regulation that compels them to make allowances for every conceivable disability. They are not permitted to select their customers in the same way as Ryanair or CostCo. The trains are outfitted with spaceship-like toilets thanks to disability regulations and the Government’s ‘Inclusive Transport Strategy’, which allocates hundreds of millions to help people get on trains. The rail industry has shown some signs of wishing to emulate the efficiency of the low-cost airlines with their progressive proposal to close 980 ticket offices, saving £500m a year.

Given that the rail operators are firmly committed to maintaining unusable websites, this efficiency was only made plausible by the intervention of Trainline. Trainline charges a minimal booking fee for the service of aggregating the available routes to your destination and delivering you a digital ticket. This turned out to be a service worthy of a billion-pound market cap. As a reward for this service, like Ryanair, they are accused by the Telegraph of ‘drip pricing,’ as if putting the price up from the listed price in exchange for the convenience of buying the ticket through the app in one click is some sort of moral crime. Unfortunately, Trainline’s assistance in the mission to close the useless ticket offices was rendered null and void last October after 750,000 people responded to the consultation indicating that using the app was beyond them. So the pointless jobs printing tickets remain.

With a general election looming, we will soon replace a government that is only mildly embarrassed to look out for the individual with one that actively hates them. Expect the years of Labour government to mark a flood of ‘civil rights’ legislation forcing businesses to include the price of a vast number of special allowances in what they charge you. Until then, look out for your £11.99 flights — and don’t bring a bag.