When you want to know what the future trends are likely to be for low cost carriers keen to make airline travel as profitable as possible (but still reasonably affordable for us travelers) then a good place to look is the British budget airline Ryanair. They are certainly becoming famous for devising ways to make airline travel as cheap as possible – usually by stripping back the standard “frills” that passengers get to an absolute minimum and charging extra for things we used to take for granted. But somehow it’s hard to argue with their strategy because it does mean that their flights across all corners of Europe and down to Africa are often available at extraordinarily cheap prices.
Ryanair’s News This Week: Standing Room Only
The latest attempt by Ryanair to make their flights more profitable is their idea of vertical seating. At the moment, this means that Ryanair is considering removing four regular rows of seats in their aircraft and replacing them with “something like a stool to lean on or sit on”, according to spokesman Stephen McNamara, basically making this area almost just like standing room. It is not quite clear how many extra passengers they would fit in but we can only assume that these would be the cheapest seats on the plane. The airline is currently in discussions with Boeing about the possibility of fitting out aircraft in this manner and presumably a few more concerns (safety, for example) need to be ironed out before such a plan gets put into action.
Apparently Ryanair isn’t even the only airline considering putting in “standing room” areas in their airplanes – Chinese airline Spring Airlines has been talking to Airbus about something very similar. Fitting more people on the planes obviously makes their chance for profitability higher – but will passengers want to fly this way? Judging by the previous history and experience of low cost carriers, the answer is probably yes, if the price is low enough.
Ryanair’s Previous Ideas on Cutting Costs
Of course, not all of Ryanair’s myriad of ideas on how to cut costs turn into end results. In recent months, Ryanair has raised ideas like charging passengers to use the bathroom or measuring the Body Mass Index of passengers and charging them accordingly; these ideas haven’t progressed to reality, but other extra charges like fees if you don’t print out your boarding passes at home have angered some passengers.
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MixxTags: low cost carriers, Ryanair
Categories: Travel News
{ 1 comment }
This is a really interesting article, it seems logical that a ’standing room’ is the next step for airlines since so much other transportation has it, but it almost seems crazy! I am very anxious to see if this happens
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