Sorry easyJet, but as sweeteners go, this is hopeless. We’ve all got summer holidays coming up, flights to buy, that sort of thing, and you send a frigging cookie to the Bitterwallet offices. Pathetic. Admittedly it’s a big cookie, but Mof’s already ate half the bloody thing – by the time Andy gets back from the off license there’ll be sod all left.

According to new passenger numbers released by the Civil Aviation Authority, easyJet is now the diameter of this cookie. Congratulations.

To be honest with you, our money was on Ryanair coming up with the first promotion to capitalise on the British Airways strikes, but easyJet have beaten them to it:

“easyJet have announced that following the news that British Airways cabin crew are set to take industrial action, the airline will offer British Airways Executive Gold card holders free speedy boarding plus (priority check-in and boarding) on the days that BA crew strike.

“Paul Simmons, easyJet’s UK general manager, said: “We believe that our award winning service and amazingly low-fares will attract even more BA passengers to fly with easyJet. This is a golden opportunity for BA’s Executive Club card holders to try our Speedy Boarding product – after which, they will never look back.”

If you say so. It’s now likely that Sky Marshall O’Leary has the Ryanair marketing team locked in a cellar, thrashing them at regular intervals until they come up with an outrageously childish promotion to strike back with. In fact, we imagine a situation at Ryanair HQ not too dissimilar to this:

easyJet is the most popular airline in the UK, ladies and gentlemen. That’s according to this just in – from easyJet. The press release also refers to easyJet as the ‘UK’s national airline’, no doubt an example of calculated posturing amongst the strike turmoil for flag-bearing British Airways.

According to the figures provided by the Civil Aviation Authority, in 2009 easyJet carried 28,147,268 passengers – ’significantly more than any other airline’ according to the press release. Except it isn’t really, at least not according to the same set of figures which show Ryanair in second place with 28,095,201 UK passengers. That’s a difference of 52,067 passengers, or less than 0.2 per cent – hardly a difference that can be described as significant.

The press release puts British Airways is third with 26,274,056 passengers carried in 2009, although that figure is adjusted to strip out journeys made by transfer passengers. After that, there’s fresh air between BA and fourth place BMI (6.8 million) and fifth place FlyBe (6.75 million).

Interestingly, easyJet deliberately avoids describing themselves as ‘the UK’s favourite airline’; the press release uses the terms ‘the UK’s national airline’ and ‘the UK’s most popular airline‘. Of course Ryanair refers to itself as ‘Britain’s favourite airline’, thus opening of another can of ambiguous worms; favourite isn’t the same as popular, while Britain isn’t the same as the UK.

It’s all ammunition for the upcoming airline dogfight that’s intensifying between easyJet and Ryanair; after challenging the airline’s Stelios Haji-Ioannou to an idiotic ‘Sumo Smackdown’ in Trafalgar Square, Sky Marshall O’Leary is now blowing air out his hole about easyJet’s refusal to publish punctuality figures for its services. O’Leary might have a point, but what kind of businessman puts his name to a press release like this?

“Stelios has so far failed to take up Ryanair’s challenge of a race around Trafalgar Square, or a wheelbarrow race, or even a sumo wrestling bout where Stelios’ obvious talents would give him a significant advantage…”

“Stelios obviously can’t run, but he can’t hide either.”

HE’S FAT, WE GET IT, MICHAEL. Bravo to you, sir, for taking the piss out of people for being overweight – a courageous move, for sure. Sadly, it’s difficult to care much when you yourself come across as an appallingly offensive jumped-up shit of a man.

In the past Ryanair has slagged off the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and called them “Monty Pythonesque” and “Absolutely Stupid Asses”. However, they’ve gone running to the ASA like wailing babies after EasyJet took the piss out of them in an ad campaign.

Ryanair have long moaned about the ASA after the regulatory board repeatedly smacked their legs over continued abuse of advertising rules.

Now they’re asking the ASA to tell EasyJet off after a poster campaign saw the light of day which claimed that Ryanair did not fly to airports customers believed they had booked.

The strapline on the ad ran: “Who loves flying you to the place you actually booked?”.

One the spots pointed out that Ryanair flights to Paris actually landed in Beauvais and a trip to Barcelona would see you touching down at Girona airport. Ryanair complained that the ad was misleading. The ASA agreed (although, I bet they would have loved to have stuck their fingers in their ears and pretended that they couldn’t hear Ryanair’s weeping).

“We considered the challenging tone of the headline “Who loves flying you to the place you actually booked?” combined with the implication that Ryanair misled customers and flew them to airports different to the ones to which they had booked was denigratory,” the ASA said.

[Guardian]

Think about the way airlines portray themselves. If British Airways are ethereal choral music (’The Flower Duet’ by Léo Delibes if you’re wondering) then EasyJet are… well… Black Lace.

Or, in the case of a free promotional gig for the World’s Cruddiest Airline, two blokes who claim to be Black Lace despite not being that bloke with white Farah slacks and peroxide hair who you’ll recognise from the famous appearances on Top of the Pops in the ’80s.

The two blokes pictured right are Black Lace. You wouldn’t guess if they kicked you up the arse repeatedly, hollering the commands of ‘Superman’ in your ear.

Anyway, the depressing world of PR manifested itself in public yesterday, with ‘Black Lace’ performing songs which included a touching Eurodance version of ‘I Am The Music Man’… in front of, well, let’s put it this way – there were more people covering it and associated with EasyJet than there were people of the Great British Public there for a good time.

Performing in orange Hawaiian shirts and issuing people with a Fez or two, ‘Black Lace’ saved the best (or, most crushingly awful if you prefer) ’til last. Yep, not only have they reworked the lyrics to ‘Agadoo’ to incorporate a tale about one of EasyJet’s new destinations (you can hear that monstrosity here… be warned, your ears will go red with embarrassment even though you weren’t there), but they’ve written a paean to EasyJet with the Dylan-worthy lyrics of “From Paphos, Menorca and Sharm el Sheikh too… We danced, we danced… join the EasyJet crew.”

Mercifully, the assembled were issued with lyrics sheets that braced us with the line ‘PASSENGER WARNING! MAY RESULT IN FUN!‘

Sometimes, when art and commerce collide, even a grey day in Manchester can’t spoil the glorious outpourings of two men ready to embrace fame once more. Sadly, this little turn fucked any (slim) chance of that. All the forced fun of a swingers party where no-one fancies each other and the only game woman has a runny arse. God bless EasyJet and two men who aren’t Black Lace (apparently, we all get to be a member of the group at some point… a bit like jury service) who were kind enough to flick the vickies at me.

Who’d want to get on a plane this week, eh? Europe is screeeewed. Getting around isn’t too easy as thousands of pilots, air traffic controllers and cabin crew conspire to ruin your day. What’s going on, then? And will you still be leaving on a jet plane later in the week?

Yesterday, 4,000 pilots at German airline Lufthansa began four days of strikes – the good news is that the action was called off after a day. The bad news? Flights are likely to remain affected until Friday. For further information on affected flights, Lufthansa has made their adhoc schedules available online.

Meanwhile French air traffic controllers today began a four day strike – no real reason, they just enjoy it – meaning hundreds of flights in and out of Paris are severely delayed or cancelled. Airlines have cut half of services at Orly airport and a quarter at Charles de Gaulle, and easyJet - one of France’s major operators – has also been forced to cut flights in and out of Lyon. You can check to see whether your flight is affected through the easyJet flight schedules.

And then the news that after plenty of huffing and puffing at Christmas, over four fifths of British Airways cabin crew have once again voted to strike. So what does this mean if you’ve booked up to travel with BA? At the moment, absolutely nothing – while the union Unite now have the ability to legally strike, they’ve announced they won’t decide on when to take action until they’ve held further talks with BA’s management.

According to the BBC, Unite have also announced there will be no strikes over Easter – presumably their experience at Christmas taught the union that striking at times of peak travel only sours public support.

You might not like his airline or his business tactics but there comes a time when you have to just stand back and admire the balls on Ryanair’s Sky Marshall Michael O’Leary.

Faced with a legal threat from Easyjet’s Sir Stelios over a Ryanair ad, O’Leary has said that he’ll pull the ads if Stelios will take him on in a ‘Chariots Of Fire’-style race around Trafalgar Square. No, really.

Sir Stelios claims that Ryanair have made “baseless and grossly defamatory” statements about him in the ads, which focussed on Easyjet’s reluctance to publish their punctuality figures and featured a photo of Sir Stelios with an elongated Pinocchio nose. Classy stuff Sky Marshall.

The Easyjet boss wants an apology and damages for what his lawyers say are causing: “ongoing and escalating damage to our client’s reputation.” But all the Sky Marshall wants to do is pull on a pair of trainers and settle the feud like a pair of seven-year-olds.

O’Leary adds that if Sir Stelios doesn’t fancy a race to settle things, he’ll be happy to sort it with a Sumo fight, saying: “As long as he provides the nappies, bring it on.”

Ah, easyJet. You get it so right, so often, but then you drop clangers the size of Belgium.

Yesterday the budget airline emailed thousands of customers to inform them that their summer flights had been cancelled. A terrible shame, for sure, throwing many customers into a panic over their holiday plans. Were alternative flights available? What about the hire car? Do we still have a holiday?

Flights from May to August were cancelled – of course customers were offered a refund or the opportunity to book onto another flight, but the plans of many passengers had been screwed over good over proper, and no doubt several started making alternative plans.

Then several hours later, a second email from easyJet appeared:

“If you received an email earlier tonight that your flight was cancelled, please ignore the previous email. Your flight is NOT cancelled. We would like to sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused by a technical error.

“We are writing to let you know that we have had to reschedule some of our flights. Unfortunately, your flight is one of those affected.”

In many instances, flights had simply been shifted earlier or later in the day, but none had been cancelled. Tremendous effort, easyJet.

[Daily Mail]

We’ve been harsh critics of easyJet’s Speedy Boarding service in the past, because a reasonable number of flights require passengers to travel between the terminal and aircraft by shuttlebus. It meant customers paying for speedy boarding would board a bus first, rather than the plane, and still be involved in the bun fight for seats along with the commoners.

We hadn’t realised easyJet had made changes to ensure Speedy Boarding offers at least some advantage. Yesterday on a flight home from Barcelona, there were two queues at two separate exits for passengers – one queue was for people who’d paid for speedy boarding. There were four of them:

When the bus pulled up, one of the three bus doors was allocated to speedy boarders – inside they had a quarter of the bus floorspace chained off, while the driver tried to squeeze everyone else into the remaining space. When we reached the plane, the speedy boarders were allowed out first:

Two reasons it didn’t work; the flight was hardly half-full so a second bus had to bring the remaining passengers over – so few in fact they probably would have fitted on the first bus. That, and the speedy boarder passengers didn’t look comfortable about being scrutinised by the passengers on the other side of the chain. They paid for the simple perk of being called to board the plane first, but one woman felt the need to apologise for having so much room and it was a all little silly, wasn’t it?

The good news is you now receive the service you pay for – you’ll just have to put up with several dozen strangers enjoying less personal space than a battery hen staring back at you with contempt.

How do easyJet work out seat prices? And who spends their Summer holidays in Munich? In June?

You may have noticed in the press last week that easyJet attempted to karate-chop Aer Lingus in the windpipe with a new advertising campaign about Aer Lingus talking the talk when offering cheap flights, but not walking the walk. Or even flying it. This is what easyJet had to say:

easyJet, the largest UK airline, today launched a new advertising campaign to illustrate the wide gap in fares between easyJet and Aer Lingus at London Gatwick.

When Aer Lingus entered the London market a year ago they boasted about bringing a low-fares alternative to the London market. Today we are seeing their fares on comparable routes set at around £100 higher than easyJet – each way, and not the low-fares they had triumphantly announced.

easyJet have also had brassy new posters printed to sell their low prices “this Summer”:

The small print at the bottom mentions the stated fares “were correct on 4th January and are based on price per seat averaged over June 2010.” The press release for the ads didn’t appear until the middle of last week,  and we didn’t have a snoop around prices until yesterday, so the advertising campaign was only four days old.

When we checked, the majority of days in June offered lower fares than those quoted. Hurrah! In fact, on all but one day the lowest fare between Gatwick and Munich was £22.99. Of course the small print states the figures are based on average price per seat – easyJet operates several flights a day on each route and many are more expensive, which accounts for the difference between lowest available fare quoted on the website and the average seat price quoted in the advertising.

And there are low fares all round for the examples quoted, except one. On seven days in June, a single flight from Gatwick to Faro could be bought for £28.99, lower than the £31.99 quoted in the advert. Across the whole of the month, however, the average lowest daily fare was closer to £39, with the lowest daily fare climbing as high as £62.99. Again, the price quoted in the ads refers to the average price per seat and there are five flights per day to Faro on some days, so we need to consider the pricing of seats on all the flights available. Of the 130 flights in June, seats on over 70 of them couldn’t be purchased for less than £52.99, with prices on several flights climbing as high as £112.99.

So what’s going on? Either easyJet is laying on jumbo jets to provide extra capacity for cheap seats in order to lower the average seat price – which they’re not – or perhaps they’re taking into account seats sold at a much lower price before 4th January to bring the average. If that’s not the case either, then in the past week Londoners have gone horseshit crazy over the notion of sunshine and started booking up flights to Faro in their thousands, driving the price of the remaining seats well beyond the advertised price. If it is true, however, it’s already rendered a four day old advertising promotion out of date.

Not that shouting about low prices will do easyJet any harm of course. But what about the overall advertising message easyJet is beaming into your brain? Aside from “Aer Lingus is expensive”, you’re exposed to a second message – “easyJet cheap summer flights”; there are only four lines of copy and summer is mentioned twice. Yet with the exception of Faro, none of the other examples provided are typical summer resorts. easyJet flies from Gatwick to the biggest holiday destinations in Europe – Gran Canaria, Majorca, Malaga and plenty more besides – but the examples are for the likes of Munich and Zurich. That, and the fact that easyJet is selling the notion of summer travel based on prices in June; while June is a Summer month, it’s not the time most consumers consider travelling abroad for summer, especially families with children. The seed is planted though – “easyJet offers cheap summer flights.”

We’re actually big fans of easyJet – they prove it’s not that difficult to be upfront about the costs of flights, instead of lumping taxes on top of advertised prices – but using flights to Munich in June to sell the notion of affordable summer flights is pushing it. And we’d be keen to know how they did their maths. We’ve asked the question, and we’ll let you know the answer when we get one.

Looking to make hay while the sun shines – if you consider the recent near-implosion of British Airways to be a bright point in the year – easyJet have hit their customer base with a long list of reasons to fly with them on business trips. Perhaps the days of booking BA for reasons of stature have passed, but we don’t see many switching from business class to budget airlines, and those who are flying economy are unlikely to be that loyal to any one brand anyway.

Amongst the BA-busting burble from easyJet is the ability to switch to an earlier flight for free and no charge for hand baggage, no matter how much it weighs – always welcome in these days of staff greedily eyeing the scales. One point not mentioned is the fine levied for extra items of hand luggage; in fact it’s not mentioned anywhere on the easyJet site according to blogger Damian Corrigan:

There is no warning before you check in. Even the airline’s staff are in the dark about it. I asked an on-board steward how much the fine was and he said it was the same as for extra checked luggage – 11€ online, 22€ on the day. But there is no facility to pay for the extra hand luggage when booking.

According to easyJet customer services, of course you’re allowed a second item of hand luggage as long as it’s booze and tabs from Duty Free, otherwise the unmentioned fine will be charged. Given that Ryanair were given so much grief about similar charges earlier in the year, it’s odd that easyJet don’t mention it. Or perhaps it isn’t.

Which? has been snooping around the websites of the budget airlines, and you’ll never guess what they found. It turns out that two airlines are charging eczema sufferers a mandatory cleaning fee for shedding their skin in the cabin.  No, not really – it’s more obvious than that. The consumer folk discovered that baggage fees and credit card booking charges can increase the cost of a flight by nearly 30 per cent.

The number one villain for pumping up the prices was Ryanair, which added over 29 per cent – £50 – to a flight to Malaga from the East Midlands booked for February when a bag was checked in and a credit card used. Which? then booked in with bmibaby and the price of their flight to Paris increased by a quarter, while a flight to Malaga increased by 23 per cent.

EasyJet was the hero of the piece for consistently offering the lowest luggage and credit card charges out of the four airlines checked, although the additional charges still added 17 per cent to two of the flights checked by the consumer bods.

Of course, while it pains us to stick up for the budget airlines in any way, plenty of people booking short-haul flights to Europe are taking short city breaks and will never require a case to be booked into the hold. Racking up the ancillary revenue through credit card charges on the other hand – that’s an outrageous practise that few other retailers would ever get away with.

[The Guardian]

Those of you with eagle eyes and long memories may recall a story we published around a year ago, concerning a discount scheme operated by Shopper Discounts & Rewards, which is owned by Webloyalty.

We explained the scheme began when you reached the checkout page of several major internet merchants operating in the UK, including TheTrainline and easyJet. The sites would partner with Shopper Discounts & Rewards to offer an incentive such as cashback on your next purchase. Accepting the offer meant accepting the terms of Shopper Discounts & Rewards, in that the merchant shared your billing details with the scheme, which in turn signed you up to a monthly recurring membership, typically billed at £10 per month.

Our post, which then proceeded to call out Webloyalty for this practice, was published on Bitterwallet but taken down shortly afterwards. Webloyalty’s legal team immediately lept into action.  We had said a whole bunch of stuff they didn’t like and linked to plenty of forums and newspaper articles – there are people who clearly weren’t fans of Webloyalty. It’s not often we comply with such notices – in fact this is the only time we have.

Why bring this up now? Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch is being far more vocal about Webloyalty and other companies, taking his cue from a report released by a U.S. Senate Committee called “Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and their Impact on American Consumers”. It states that Webloyalty is one of the three largest companies involved in this activity, and that together they have earned over $1.4 billion (around £833 million) in revenue from 35 million transactions, with 4 million people currently enrolled in the plans.

Below is a list of partner companies profiting from this “post-transaction marketing”; obviously it is dominated by American companies, but it gives you an idea of the popularity of such schemes:

How much has Webloyalty earned from its UK transactions? The US State Senate report concerns only US consumers so it doesn’t comment. The report is certainly worth a read - it discusses various tactics employed to encourage sign-up, as well as details of Webloyalty settling a major lawsuit:

A smorgasbord of budget airline news popping a cap in your ass, ladies and gentlemen, and NONE of it involves Sky Marshall O’Leary. Yes, you’re welcome:

Hang on to your hats – Jet2.com has been named Passenger Airline of the Year 2009 by the Baltic Air Charter Association. The budget airline received the accolade at the Baltic Air Charter Association’s 60th anniversary lunch and awards for excellence at the Guildhall in London last week. You’ll know what a big deal this is when you hear the awards were hosted by none other than BBC presenter Clare Balding. Exactly

easyJet has begun a four day sale with up to 30 per cent off all flights; we’ve just had a quick gander at the dates and costs, and there are plenty of flights to Europe in January for under £40 return, although we haven’t seen much yet that was cheaper compared to a week or two ago.

Monarch has joined forces with the she-devil of online payments, PayPal, to give customers the chance to win back the cost of their flights. Passengers booking flights through the website and paying through PayPal will be entered into a nationwide prize draw, and 500 PayPal customers will win back the value of their transactions each week.

bmibaby proves to be the runt of the budget airline litter – nearly 160 staff are eyeballing redundancy as the company considers the now legendary restructuring option to save itself. 54 pilot and 82 cabin crew positions at Birmingham, Manchester and Cardiff airports at risk, and the airline is reducing its number of aircraft from 17 to 12 next year. A dozen planes. Really, why bother – put on buses or something.

Worryingly-named Bitterwallet reader ‘Bedlam’ has written to us with this little nugget of joy…

“Easyjet charge you £2.95 when you pay with a debit card, but there is a loophole.

Choose Visa Electron (which has no charge for use) from the drop-down menu,then input your Visa Debit Card details.

The Easyjet system can’t tell the difference between a Debit and an Electroncard number, so you don’t get charged the £2.95.”

Sounds ace. Anyone else tried it? Can you vouch for it or is Bedlam blowing smoke up the ass of the Bitterwallet community? Maybe it’s common knowledge already – if it is, we don’t care actually because if it helps just ONE person out there to save £2.95 then we’ve done our job.

God, you’re all so critical…