Making the customer pay for the company’s mistakesThere has been a lot of commentary recently about Ryanair’s new online check-in policy. Passengers can pay £5 to check in online or £40 if they want to check in at the airport. The £5 charge is defended as a decrease for passengers used to paying £10 to check in at the airport. Well there’s an apples and oranges comparison! I’ve actually been quite a supporter of Ryanair in the past which often surprises people. Many people view it as offering poor customer service and therefore feel it must be a bad company. I’ve always viewed it as true to its values. It doesn’t offer great customer service but neither does it claim to. It does what it says it does pretty well. As is so often said, without Ryanair we in Ireland would still be paying a week’s wages to go to London. The company has also opened up many areas to tourism and created economic growth. A comment in an article in the Sunday Times about the new check-in arrangements caught my eye though. The article claims that Ryanair say that one reason for the price rise is to help defray the cost of cleaning up the website as ordered by the European commission. So they are telling us that customers are being charged to pay for their mistakes. Initially I could understand the airlines wish to distinguish between the cost of the flight and the taxes on the website. But now it’s gone mad (and not just with Ryanair to be fair) with so many additional charges, most of which you have to accept if you wish to fly. Let’s compare it to going into an off-licence to buy a bottle of wine which is a similar situation in terms of taxes imposed by government. You see a bottle of wine advertised in the window at €3.80. Bargain you think. You bring it to the cash desk and are asked for €11.96. You look aghast and the cashier gives you an itemised bill. There was €2.46 added in duty and 21.5% in Vat which adds up to €7.61. There’s a charge of €1.20 as you’re buying after 8pm – that’s to make up for the antisocial hours the cashier is working. You used a basket while you were browsing – added another 80cent for that. Oh and you legally have to wrap the bottle in a paper bag to bring it out on the street so they’re charging you 60 cent for that. They had to light the window display so added a 25 cent electricity surcharge to this bottle of wine. You're paying with a credit card so there's a €1 charge for that. They got fined for selling outside the legal opening hours recently so are putting a surcharge of 50 cent on every purchase to help pay the fine. You wouldn’t put up with it would you? Add a CommentYour comment will appear once it has been approved. |