Burning Lemons

Last night I got back from a trip to France. During the long time spent in various airports and on planes I got thinking about the remarkable changes that have occurred in European air travel over the last 15 years. Before about 1995 if you wanted to fly from here in Scotland to a regional airport in lets say France or Germany (totally hypothetically I’ll say Glasgow-Perpignan) you would have been handing over the better part of about £500 and would have to take at least 3 flights, and woe betide you if you didn’t plan to spend a Saturday night in your destination, if you didn’t that could be up to another £1000 poured straight into the pockets of your chosen national carrier.

Competition did exist of course (well from around the 1970s onwards) but this was mainly in the form of charter airlines flying from regional airports to sunshine spots in Spain, Portugal and Greece. The flights were infrequent, unreliable and still not particularly cheap.

Enter Ryanair and easyJet, arguments rage to this day over who was the first true no-frills airline, easyJet’s first flight was in November 1995 and Ryanair born out of a full-service Irish regional airline started it’s slow, gradual transformation to its current low-cost model in the early 1990s. What is certain though is the bang that they made. Although the change was slow at first expansion was rapid for the two airlines. Validation for the sector came shortly afterwards when British Airways launched its own no-frills airline in the form of Go (later swallowed by easyJet).

What the revolution has done is placed previously small unheard of places on the map. Ryanair in particular with its policy of flying from smaller regional airports (and then lying about their location) has caused explosive growth for certain parts of Europe. Hahn, 70 miles from Frankfurt in The Rhineland-Pfaltz region of Germany went from being a closed US Air Force base to a low-cost hub with 40 flights every day to destination across Europe in just 10 years. Ryanair has proved that it is economically possible to make money flying about 150 people a day from the Western German countryside to The North of Spain.

And so we come to my flight (see how I did that?). I paid £30 to fly around 1200 miles on two flights, while I give that many fares are much higher I have got fares like this time and again and I thin that whatever you may make of Ryanair you must admit the contribution it has made to growth in Europe and regeneration of deprived areas over the last 10 years.