Flights and Fights: Inside the Low Cost Airlines

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Flights and Fights: Inside the Low Cost Airlines, a documentary examining how budget airlines revolutionized the travel industry.
To some, Cheap Airlines mean the joys of a cheap weekend in Prague or beach break in Alicante. To others, they have turned the glamour of flying into an ordeal of queues, slack-jawed boredom and petty humiliation. Whatever your view, though, they have indisputably changed the way we travel. As last night’s documentary Flights and Fights: Inside the Low Cost Airlines  reminded us, EasyJet now carries more passengers than British Airways. Sandi Toksvig, sounding like a mildly disgruntled headmistress, made the perfect narrator for this tale of big characters, big business and huge, Machiavellian chutzpah. There were many revealing anecdotes about how an Irishman  and a Greek Cypriot  turned a hidebound industry on its head, but my favourite concerned orange juice. To start with, Ryanair bought orange juice to sell on its flights. Then O’Leary decided that the orange juice supplier should hand it over for free, since it was a good marketing opportunity. Then he decided they should pay for the privilege of giving him orange juice. Then he decided they should pay for the glasses, too. The supplier capitulated on every count. It was hard to know whether to be impressed or appalled.
O’Leary may be famed as a customer-scorning caricature, but his career did not start out that way. We learned that the consummate provocateur was in fact a quiet accountant before reluctantly taking on the top job at the then ailing airline in 1994. It was gratifying, if tricky, to imagine that O’Leary would much rather be number crunching than gurning like an electrocuted stoat next to a bevy of bikini-clad cabin crew.
The obsession with cost cutting  however over-egged for the media  became more understandable when we learned that for all its multi-billion market value, Ryanair gets by on a profit margin of just £6 per passenger. The deregulation of the airline industry created opportunities as well as casualties, and Ryanair thrived with its pile it high, sell it cheap approach. There were more hard lessons on business in this documentary’s pithy interviews with O’Leary, Haji-Ioannou, senior executives and harried stewards than a whole series of bluster on The Apprentice.
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Providing a masterclass on branding  of a sort  was easyJet’s Haji-Ioannou, who decided that he wanted to own the color orange. The startling company shade is not, as you might have thought, the result of a hung-over mishap, but a deliberate ploy to identify the most shocking, vivid orange we could.
As well as dazzling our retinas, cheap airlines have put many parts of Europe in regular contact with Brits abroad for the first time, from the villages of France to the beer-soaked stag capitals of Eastern Europe. This enjoyable, catty, informative program did a deft job capturing the mixed blessings of the phenomenon. One Latvian policeman had a sobering take on the boozy British psyche: In the night there are many Brits. There was one guy dressed as Spiderman. He was a bad Spiderman. That’s how they enjoy their time.             Visit ..  http://www.cheap-flight-4u.com