Regarding pay. Easyjet are now amongst the best paid crew in the UK if you were to start today. On average an Easyjet F/A earns 24K before tax compared to around 18-20K at VS or BA mixed fleet. On the latter two that also includes allowances that are basically expenses for being down route.
Easyjet crew aren't paid hourly but by sector, BA mixed fleet are paid hourly and so was I when i worked at a BA franchise. I'm not trying to prove a point when I say that I earned a lot more as a junior crew member at Easyjet than I did at the BA franchise.
A typical return to the canaries is an 11 hour duty. 4 years ago at the franchise junior crew received £2.60 an hour which equals £28.60 in sector/flight pay. That is roughly what BA mixed fleet earn now. At Easyjet your F/A rank earns £79. All these examples are on top of basic pay and any commission paid.
So the paying peanuts getting monkeys, atleast at Easyjet, is utter rubbish. I sometimes think employing some 19 year olds is perhaps a little too young but there are many older, experienced crew who work for us and as I alluded to earlier they have multiple airlines under their belt whether that be full service, charter and indeed low cost. We even had a lovely lady who worked for the Qatar royal flight. However you pretty much glossed over that. That is Easyjet, I don't know about Ryanair but please don't tarnish my colleagues with the same brush.
The reason why legacy and higher echelon operators don't experience this problem is:
(a) because they charge more to fly with them, thus keeping the dregs of society to a minimum.
(b) because the CC strategically assess the situation early before it escalates.
The main reason they don't get those passengers is because they don't operate LPL-PMI, MAN-IBZ, LGW-HER etc etc. You'll find that on LGW-VIE, LGW-MAD etc the passenger profile isn't an awful lot different to some legacies.
(a) because they charge more to fly with them, thus keeping the dregs of society to a minimum.
I find that comment offensive. Again, you have totally misrepresented what my point was. There is a difference between a bit rowdy and unruly. I never said I allowed unruly behaviour on my flights. A group of lads going on their first holiday abroad and being a bit rowdy does not make them the dregs of society!!!
A bunch of DRUNKS heading for the boarding gate need to be intercepted BEFORE they get on board - simples! It doesn't take a professor to work that one out.
IF some get onboard, then the work load is greater - managing them but nonetheless it is manageable. Oh - the Captain needs to be told BEFOREHAND, so he/she can assist in the scheme of things.
Drunks in terminal; we often rely on passengers to give us information. I can assure you that they are assessed. Being loud does not mean they are automatically offloaded but they are assessed on how they speak in terms of whether they are abusive, are they slurring. You also look at how they walk and whether you can smell.
That trip my sis in law went on, together with the other 186 passengers now has a permanent correlation between lager louts/disturbed flights/LCC's.
Again, I never condoned the behaviour on the Ryanair flight in question and the examples i talk about are nothing like that. I was talking about generally rowdy flights in the height of Summer and the challenges they can bring both in terms of passenger profile and ways with managing them.
If thats your own interpretation of LCC then so be it but if you think every flight comes anything close to the Ryanair example then you are very very deluded.
NOT good for the industry on the whole, but disasterous for that Airline's long term prospects.
Really? So why is Easyjet so profitable during one of the harshest economic environment the industry has ever seen? Why are they managing to keep load factors high whilst increasing yields? Easyjets prospects are incredibly good. Again I can't speak for Ryanair but I'm certainly not a fan.
EasyFlyer83 - I repeat: this behaviour is ENTIRELY UNACCEPTABLE and not for compromise.
Then we have to agree to disagree. Withdrawing alcohol at the first sign of a group of guys or girls and even families getting a bit loud is an over reaction, there is a better way of handling them. For the last time I have never once advocated serving alcohol to drunks and neither have i said that plying copious amounts is a good solution.
Certain flights at certain times of the year can be lively....fact. You can get people standing in the aisles chatting and laughing, sometimes being a bit loud and whilst some see this as being totally unacceptable I don't believe that it always is. And it certainly doesn't mean that alcohol should be cut off on that basis. Indeed it can cause further problems. That was my fundamental point. I never likened my experiences to the Ryanair incident.