Ryanair sits hen party in FIFTEEN separate rows as outrage over seating policy grows

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  • Pollycat
    Pollycat Posts: 34,579
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    agarnett wrote: »
    Oh and just to clarify, I too find it useful that snippets of deleted posts exist, and I wonder if we have forgotten some of the angles raised in them - a week is a long time in politics / yesterday's newspapers and all that!

    So adindas, have you thought any more about the emergency evacuation angle?
    I'm sure you remember every word of Forever blowin bubbles' posts. :whistle:
  • agarnett
    agarnett Posts: 1,301 Forumite
    edited 9 July 2017 at 2:14PM
    I remember the gist, but no, far from every word because I recall there were rather a lot, a bit about unlawful misleading and aggressive commercial practice, but majoring mostly on likely degradation of emergency evacuation times, I think, and questioning what sort of regulatory oversight actually occurs when airline baggage and seat allocation policies are deliberately changed in a way that is different to what the original aircraft designers and manufacturers expected.

    I would genuinely like to know if the majority of the flying public still don't care in the grand scheme of things. That is given the suggestion that emergency evacuation times are now on or beyond the 50 year old 90 second limit due to changes of the various airline use cases for handling cabin baggage and seat allocation, and also the ever increasing numbers of ageing and special category of passenger travellers commonly now present in cabins.

    I mean once upon a time, even in airliners, it was fairly important to make sure that passengers' and their baggage weights were accurately assessed before loading. For many years UK airlines by agreement with CAA used weight estimates of I think an average 80kg for male and average 65kg for female passengers.

    Ryanair still quotes "Weight and Balance" as a reason why you should stay exactly in your allocated seat during the critical phases of takeoff and landing, and it also states you aren't supposed to take more than 10kg in your main cabin bag, but Ryanair knows that its engines, flight control adjustment and airframes can take up quite a lot of slack, so even if you are a rotund giant, it doesn't ask you if you happen to weigh more than 110kg in your underpants :p

    My feeling is like so many things in our modern lives, the masses probably don't even want to start to think about horrible scenarios like emergency evacuation of an aircraft unless something very nasty happened on a flight just like theirs in the last few days. Let three weeks pass, and as we see with the other horrible scenario, it has dropped off the front page, and largely out of the public consciousness just like the New Orleans Levee failures. I know I risk sounding like one of those "told you so" armchair experts who think if they spout enough predictions then one day they'll be able to say they were right all along! I promise you I am not of that ilk, and have no such desire.

    Look at the differences in improved motor vehicle safety in the last 50 years - seatbelts in the back as well as the front! Airbags. Passenger safety cells, crumple zones, automatic emergency braking to name a few. Sure, richardw was right to point out days or weeks ago that materials approved for use in aircraft cabins have become much more carefully regulated, and we know navigation and automated landing equipment is a lot better, but 737 has been around all those 50 years and apart from the extra couple of hatches over the wings for 737-800/900, there's still the same limited number of exits. Yet the number of seats is very much higher than earlier models, load factors are much higher and the amount of potentially combustible baggage material now regularly carried inside the cabin is perhaps far more in bulk than the old-fashioned combustible cabin lining and seat materials that got removed by regulation.

    I understand mass reluctance to question. I understand government reluctance not to rock too many corporate boats especially in areas where global standards seem to have been set and where if we made ourselves too different with red tape, our countries' more important businesses, whether it be Eire or UK or any other, may look uncompetitive, but I do think that complacency must be avoided and that corporates should be encouraged to behave with civility, and with progressive ideas about real safety improvement, which is why I'll witter on for a bit longer on this if MSE allows.
  • fifeken
    fifeken Posts: 2,700
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    agarnett - I agree current policies affect evacuation times, but I don't claim selling methods are a safety hazard (post #270 unless more cuts are made). You might do other users a favour by spending more time reading and less writing.
  • agarnett
    agarnett Posts: 1,301 Forumite
    edited 11 July 2017 at 11:16AM
    I am sorry fifeken, I am not entirely with you on the crux of your question?

    You agree current policies affect evacuation times. I obviously take it you agree that degraded (lengthened) likely emergency evacuation times are a safety issue?

    But you are making a distinction between degraded emergency evacuation times generally I think, and current selling methods which I argue do naturally degrade emergency evacuation times? Is that right?

    If I get you right, you are saying that selling seats in the way Ryanair currently does, does not degrade safety? And selling baggage space in the hold and encouraging more baggage in the cabin instead does not degrade safety?

    In the first example in the above paragraph, if you wish to argue semantics, I might almost agree with you, because it isn't the sold seats but the "free"/gratis seat allocation process which splits up groups and thereby degrades likely emergency evacuation times.

    And there is also actually a link back from this unwanted safety effect which means that the commercial practice of overtly manipulating customer decisions is in my opinion an unlawfully aggressive commercial practice. A bit like the old double-glazing salesman's "20% discount - but only if you sign tonight", except that the likely responses by many customers to that kind of treatment will cause more groups to be split up ("I'll be blowed if I need to pay to sit next to the missus for just an hour" which would likely degrade emergency evacuation times in that cabin). The aggressive practice of "We'll split you up if you don't pay to sit together" has a reduced safety effect by those who give Ryanair the finger on that!

    In my second example, because Ryanair has long encouraged baggage in the cabin rather than the hold, and because most cabin baggage is combustible, I would expect most commentators to agree that emergency evacuation times are likely degraded by the long term policy of encouraging the bulk of passenger baggage to get carried inside the cabin rather than the hold. My assertion is primarily and naturally because of the likelihood of more smoke and fire earlier in the evacuation (if a fire affects the cabin). I assert a secondary affect which is a likely tendency for a significant proportion of evacuation passengers to try to take baggage with them out of the plane if they are not in the hold.

    (Text removed by MSE Forum Team)
  • Pollycat
    Pollycat Posts: 34,579
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    agarnett wrote: »
    I am sorry fifeken, I am not entirely with you on the crux of your question?
    I don't believe fifeken asked a question.
    fifeken wrote: »
    agarnett - I agree current policies affect evacuation times, but I don't claim selling methods are a safety hazard (post #270 unless more cuts are made). You might do other users a favour by spending more time reading and less writing.
    No question marks there.
    Just 2 statements.
  • agarnett
    agarnett Posts: 1,301 Forumite
    edited 11 July 2017 at 9:25AM
    Oh dear.

    The point Pollycat is that in the context of this thread, the two statements are ostensibly inconsistent, which begs the question but without need for a question mark to emphasise the begging bit - subtle eh? :p

    By making those two statements as fifeken did, there's actually a further question as to how fifeken deduced that I had misread something fifeken had written about selling methods. Fifeken did say in post#270 that the selling tactic of introducing a switched price was not safety related. I disagree. That is why I said fifeken was calling black white.

    Maybe it is less easy to see why it is a safety issue because like so much that is safety related in any sphere, it is indirectly so. You have to be able to consider it fully, and then see the danger. It is possible to consider it fully and not see the danger, so I could have been softer, but I had already given fifeken credit for being perfectly able to see what was safe and what wasn't. So I was punchy when I thought fifeken was denying the obvious. I apologise to fifeken if fifeken had not seen the indirect link that I am about to explain again:

    The selling tactic I think we were discussing was essentially bait and switch. I believe bait and switch is covered by the concept of unlawful misleading commercial practice but in this case as I have said, I believe it is also an unlawful aggressive market practice because it clearly causes a good number of passengers to make an unsafe decision in giving Ryanair the finger and choosing not to pay and sitting away from their travel companions.

    I could have made it a softer message but the selling tactic either leads to a degradation of safety or it doesn't, No one is arguing that it might lead to an improvement in safety, are they? Hence my use of black versus white.
  • Pollycat
    Pollycat Posts: 34,579
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    agarnett wrote: »
    Bait and switch is unlawful pure and simple.
    agarnett wrote: »
    The selling tactic I think we were discussing was essentially bait and switch. I believe bait and switch is covered by the concept of unlawful misleading commercial practice but in this case as I have said, I believe it is also an unlawful aggressive market practice because it clearly causes a good number of passengers to make an unsafe decision in giving Ryanair the finger and choosing not to pay and sitting away from their travel companions.
    Well, as you've gone from being pretty clear about bait & switch being 'unlawful pure and simple' to 'believing' it is in the space of 5 days I won't hold my breath for the proof. :D
  • agarnett
    agarnett Posts: 1,301 Forumite
    edited 11 July 2017 at 11:17AM
    Pollycat wrote: »
    Well, as you've gone from being pretty clear about bait & switch being 'unlawful pure and simple' to 'believing' it is in the space of 5 days I won't hold my breath for the proof. :D
    Didn't big tobacco persist with interventions like yours for decades? No proof? There's no proof any of us actually exist beyond the digital containers of our own consciousnesses which are full of beliefs, but then again we keep banging heads, don't we, and arguing the toss even about how each others' heads work, so it's likely we are experiencing some sort of existence based on conflicting beliefs. Life is as pure and simple or awkward as you want to make it for yourself, or for others.

    Bait and switch isn't my term, and it isn't a neutral term. It is a term that describes the main tactic of a particular undesirable commercial selling practice which is a tactic as old as the hills. It is a misleading commercial practice and we have CPUTRs which ban those, don't we? They also ban aggressive commercial practices.

    (Text removed by MSE Forum Team)
  • Pollycat
    Pollycat Posts: 34,579
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    edited 11 July 2017 at 11:17AM
    agarnett wrote: »
    Didn't big tobacco persist with interventions like yours for decades? No proof? There's no proof any of us actually exist beyond the digital containers of our own consciousnesses which are full of beliefs, but then again we keep banging heads, don't we, and arguing the toss even about how each others' heads work, so it's likely we are experiencing some sort of existence based on conflicting beliefs. Life is as pure and simple or awkward as you want to make it for yourself, or for others.
    Did anyone allege smoking tobacco was against the law?
    As in you're stating that Ryanair are using 'bait and switch' tactics and 'bait and switch' is unlawful (your quote).
    As I understand it, smoking is still lawful so your analogy is irrelevant.
    agarnett wrote: »
    Bait and switch isn't my term, and it isn't a neutral term.
    'bait and switch; is the term you have used a number of times.

    agarnett wrote: »
    It is a term that describes the main tactic of a particular undesirable commercial selling practice which is a tactic as old as the hills. It is a misleading commercial practice and we have CPUTRs which ban those, don't we? They also ban aggressive commercial practices.
    So why doesn't somebody put a stop to Ryanair using alleged bait and switch tactics?

    (Text removed by MSE Forum Team)
  • agarnett
    agarnett Posts: 1,301 Forumite
    Well rain stopped play again with hedgecutting and I am not going to contribute further to this thread because there is strong evidence someone is complaining about offence taken about every tiny thing and causing the forum team extra work. Perhaps someone is trying to get me banned more permanently.

    So that's it on this thread I'm afraid. MSE readers loss, not mine.
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