As soon as Manchester United made it through to the European Champions League final in Rome on Wednesday 27th May, Easyjet started its rip-off programme.
It’s likely that the airline had already upped its prices prior to the game last Tuesday on the basis that even if Arsenal had won, there would have been a huge demand from London-based fans to get to Rome, but the price hikes were simply eye watering.
I’m sure most of you know that Easyjet are supposed to operate a fares policy which has a number of cheap seats, some not-quite-so-cheap seats and lastly, expensive seats for the last-minute travellers. As the cheap seats are taken, the fares move up and up so, by the time the last few seats are available, the fares for these seats can be several times the price paid by the people who booked several months in advance. It’s a good model, operated by most of the so-called low-cost airlines and encourages early booking and basically ‘punishes’ those last-minute flyers.
Now I’m a fan of Easyjet. I probably wouldn’t have been able to move down to the South of France quite so quickly as I did in 1999 if Easyjet had not been operating the Nice-Luton route. Their customer service is, unusually for a low-cost airline, quite good, and in the ‘old days’ it was actually quite fun to fly with the guy who owned the airline – good old Stelios.
But, I’m afraid their money-grabbing exercise last week left a very bad taste in the mouth. Let me give you some examples.
Easyjet don’t fly from either Manchester or Liverpool to Rome. Probably the best routes then are for the Man Utd fans to get to London and then fly from there.
Flying out on the 26th and returning on the 28th (the game is on the 27th) costs a staggering £700+ return – London-Rome.
Flying out on the 12th May and returning the following day costs only £150.
Assuming these last-minute flights are pretty full and therefore the fares shown are at the top end of the scale, Easyjet are basically ripping off passengers for £550 each!
OK – so they’re a commercial enterprise and need to make a profit but they already make a reasonable profit at the lower fares so raising them is just penalising the poor old football fan.
Ryanair was at it as well although it was difficult to work out their fare hike as the planes on the selected dates were full, but flights on the 25th and 29th May were about £400 return whilst a return fare for earlier in the month was about £60!
Good old BA’s price was about £450 return but at least they’ve always been expensive. They hadn’t actually changed their outward fares from Manchester but the return leg had been increased by about 200%.
If it was up to me I reckon I would take a cheap flight to Nice or Genoa and then hire a car and make a week of it.
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