I would prefer a ban on surbooking. This practice is unethical and close to scam.
Missing a flight is highly impacting
EU says “fuck Ryanair”
They once wanted twice as much as booking another ticket to change a name…
… and Ryan will say “fuck clients’ money”
Which is fair and should happen. You’re going to pay it anyways, but now they need to tell right up how much it’ll be.
I can see the argument for hand luggage prices when most airline planes don’t have enough room in the overhead compartments if everybody maxes them out, and the process of sorting that stuff out often adds substantial delays when loading and unloading. I’m not sure the right answer here, but I can see how there’s a legit discussion to be had there.
But the “charging to sit next to your family members” has always been indefensible.
agreed, on both. bring luggage, pay for it. bring your 5 yo, sit together if possible. (obv if there aren’t two seats together because it’s a last minute thing, no holds barred)
That’s my EU
Finally!
At the very least, it should be illegal to use the misleading tactics they use for things like seats. Not sure if airlines in the EU differ (I’m Canadian), but seemingly every airline here tries to make the seat selection seem like it’s mandatory. While I’ve never fallen for that, I wonder how many people pay for their seats simply because they didn’t realize it’s possible not to?
And Flair here in Canada is the budget airline whose whole thing is that they advertise prices that don’t include a carry-on (which is standard with every other airline in Canada). But if you want a carry-on, they’ll charge so much that their flights are often roughly the same price as the competition (and they push bundling carry-on + checked bag so that people will pay more than they need). Flair is great if you know what you’re doing, since a backpack fits the “personal item” size limit and is all I need for short trips, but many people don’t realize how it works and think they have to pay for the carry-on, plus Flair gets their listings to show up higher in search results because they will list the base price. Google Flights makes it clear that there’s no carry-on, but it still shows those flights first and someone without familiarity with Flair won’t expect carry-ons to cost as much as they do.
Most airlines do the same shit in Europe, and what makes it worse is that when you buy tickets in groups or with your partner for example, they intentionally place you separate even if there is free space next to one of the seats so that you then have to buy at least one seat to place it next to the other assigned seat. Wizzair actually used to place people together before, but then they intentionally broke it and now charge 40€ for the solution to the problem they created.
I’m happy to hear that regulators are getting involved now.
I love living in the EU.
Flying is disastrous for the climate, it should be much more expensive and regulated.
Getting rid of hidden bullshit fees is good but we really don’t want more people flying, we want less.
We need to subsidise train travel. Train travel has the disadvantage that it’s slower, but over medium distances not that much slower if one includes getting to and from airports and getting through security and such.
Trains have the advantage of being far more pleasant an experience, leaving from and arriving at more convenient locations, fewer restrictions on luggage, just generally less hassle.
But then trains are crazy expensive for some reason.
100% agree, we need to focus heavily on trains.
Trains require a lot more infrastructure on the ground than planes do. Also, the fuel for planes isn’t taxed in Europe even though it should be.
True, but it’s always like, planes are more expensive in the long run.
It’s more expensive to build a solar panel than burn coal. But after the coal has been burned, the solar panel still stays up.
“Crazy expensive” doesn’t really matter when you’re a government and can borrow or print to make investments that have investment returns in the form of efficiency gains that go on to improve the economy, much like what corporations do to grow (borrow, reinvest profits gained from growth). There isn’t really any good macroeconomic evidence that inflation is to blame because of said funding strategies, as explained by PhD Joeri Schasfoort in multiple of his videos[1], much to the behest right wing populist politicians who lie about not being able to invest in infrastructure. In the UK, Rishi Sunak is cancelling our HS2 railway falsely citing costs and even sabotaging it by sidestepping the democratically elected House of Commons by selling off gov. owned land so that the incoming Labour government will have a hard time un-cancelling HS2 - even our old conservative Brexit-causing PM David Cameron is criticising it publicly (ex-PMs rarely criticise their own party’s contemporary government).
yup. I’m in a long distance relationship. Germany to England. I’d love to take the train if it wasn’t 3x as expensive and takes like twice as long with a hundred changeovers.
Trains tend to be largely privatised. I can’t speak to other countries but here in the UK, each train company covers different lines so it’s effectively a distributed monopoly. They have no incentive to make tickets cheaper or their trains better because there isn’t any competition. Trains should be nationalised or at least have more regulations.
before making flying expensive you need to provide actual alternatives first, or else you are risking of electing populists who will reverse it quite quickly. quite a few countries in the EU still don’t have good train service.
We definitely need more high speed trains
I hope they do the same for trains
