Well, if you buy a ticket on Ryanair or Easyjet, you get just the flight - no water, no TOD sweet, nothing. You can, however buy (expensive) drinks and food on board, including alcoholic beverages.
Everything extra costs money, including hand or cabin bags that weigh more than the limit, reservation changes, wheelchair assistance, you name it. The rules are rigidly enforced. I have had to part with money because my laptop was half a kilo over the cabin bag limit.
Once you have checked in, you just get a blank boarding card - take whatever seat you like. This leads to some serious scrums. Take a kid if you want a good seat, as kids get on first.
On both Easyjet and Ryanair, there is no contracted cleaning on turnarounds, and passengers are asked towards the end of the flight to put their rubbish in a gash bag that the hostie brings down the aisle, and asked again to take rubbish with them when disembarking. The cabin is then cleaned (very superficially) by the cabin crew, so as you can probably imagine, it gets pretty grubby. As turnarounds are limited to 30 mins (ideally 20 mins), there is a lot of pressure to move quickly. There are no check-in machines (staff are cheaper), no lounges, no expensive decoration. They use the handling agent's check-in staff, as it is cheaper than employing their own.
The new Ryanair aircraft have been specified without window shades, seat-back pockets, or anything else not vital to the safety of the flight.
There is minimal handling, so no help if you are infirm or need assistance (unless you pay).
Yields are adjusted on a second-by-second basis to maximise load factors, which is the key to success with the Lo-Co model.
Pilots have to buy their own uniforms, pay for their airport car parking, pay for tea and coffee, etc etc.
You mentioned Air NZ and Airpoints. No such thing in any of the Low Cost carriers, as it costs way too much to administer.
I could go on, but I'm sure you get the picture. The point is that the Low-Cost model is built on removing everything not essential to the operation (like allocated seats for example), to cut costs. That is why I say that Air NZ is not Low Cost, but Low Fares. There is a difference. You would have to shed half the Air NZ office staff to even get close to the cut-down offices of the Low Cost carriers. No shiny buildings for them, they cut costs still further by housing their staff in the cheapest possible accomodation - at Luton (the main Easyjet base), this is essentially an old maintenance shed. Compare that to Air NZ's Auckland edifices.
Bottom line, Easyjet have admitted that the airline (ie the bit that operates the aircraft) makes no money at all. All the profit comes from extras, and it amounts to about GBP40 mill a year.
Now I assume that the domestic Air NZ flights that I have been on, between Wellington and Auckland, Christchurch and Nelson, are Express flights (they were certainly pretty cheap), and the there is no doubt at all in my mind that Air NZ is miles away from the Ryanair/Easyjet/Southwest model. I actually like that, because flying with Easyjet et al is not a pleasant experience - you do it because it is cheap.
However, one thing Easyjet don't skimp on is training their pilots. The training is pretty good.
I am not particularly down on Air NZ, I am sure they will bounce back from what was a serious drop from the glory days of the '90's, when they seemed to win awards every month. However, it is a resurgence based on a bailout, and is not an indicator of a good management performance - quite the reverse, in fact. It is easy to recover when you get handed all the cash - suppliers will fall over themselves to give you good deals, as they believe that they can't lose.
With regard to working over here, I had thought to myself that it might be nice to give something back to NZ aviation, and do some instructing. Can I get an instructing job? Even a part-time one? Pass on all those years of airline experience, emergencies, very bad weather, close calls, etc., to trainee pilots? Nope. I would be robbing some other instructor of the precious hours he or she needs to apply to Air Nelson or whatever.
I hope you can see how backwards that is. In NZ, it is the most inexperienced pilots teaching the newcomers. They have almost no experience to draw from. In other countries, older, experienced pilots are preferred, for a whole bunch of reasons - bu mostly that they are experienced, and can pass on a wealth of knowledge to their students.
When I was instructing, I hadn't experienced a genuine emergency, or even had a real weather issue. I was essentially teaching from ignorance. And so it continues.
Go figure...
Last edited by MOR; 10th Aug 2004 at 08:34.