Do airline baggage fees really piss you off? Then get a load of this: RyanAir is going to impose a fee to pee!
The firm has talked about this for a while (see Gady’s post from December) but seemed to have backed down. Now, according the Marketplace, they’re really going to do it (Ryan Air charging for in-flight toilet, Apr 7). It’s now going to cost a pound to use the lavatory on flights under an hour.
What’s interesting about this is that the rationale for the fee is essentially purely operational and reflects that a service provider can’t treat its “work in progress” like a so many pallets of parts. A spokesman for the firm explains that they don’t expect to make a whole lot of revenue on the fees but hope to minimize the number of passengers who get out of their seats during these short flights because they view this behavior as disruptive. (If you want to talk disruptive, when I mentioned these fees to my wife her response was “I’d tell my kid to whiz on the floor!”)
In a lot of ways, this makes sense. I am a little more dubious about RyanAir’s other claim. They want to remove lavatories and install another row of seats. That may be hard to do. As many people have noted they have 189 seats on their planes, which is the maximum amount 737s are certified for. Presumably, they could try to get that changed but that sounds like an expensive proposition.
[…] by the pound In ECO 101 Micro, MGT 400 Strategy, MGT 415 Operations on April 7, 2010 at 8:35 Peeing by the pound « The Operations Room. ▶ No Responses /* 0) { jQuery('#comments').show('', change_location()); […]
ok, if this is the case, I’ll not take the free drink during flight any more. Since if I do, it’s more likely I want to pee. Why don’t they charge for drinks directly anyway?
Actually, on RyanAir they do charge for drinks.
[…] that Ryanair has imposed baggage fees not for the revenue but for the cost savings. (See this and that post.) That is, he views these fees not as an opportunity to segment the market and extract more […]