I read this article in the week where the writer was bemoaning the fact she had to get to an obscure corner of France, and that the only way to get there was by Ryanair – and she then proceeded to list the airline’s considerable shortcomings. She then finished the piece by saying that of course they had no choice, but to use Ryanair as no other airline flew that route.
I was heard to mutter “actually, you have three choices apart from that. One, don’t go. Two, go by car (there’s a very convenient tunnel connecting the UK and France, in case you haven’t twigged). Three, go by train (ditto point two, with the addition of Eurostar and France’s very efficient railway service).”
OK, so that was maybe a bit flippant, but I get heartedly racked off with people whining about poor service and not voting with their feet. I decided ages ago that I’d never use Ryanair, which treats its passengers like shit and, to coin another bodily function phrase, constantly takes the piss. The airline’s latest delightful dodge is to close all check-in desks and charge people for checking in online before they leave home. Very helpful if you’re not online, or have a knackered printer …
Some good friends of mine have a house in a fairly remote part of the Dordogne, and have invited me to stay. And yes, the only airline that flies anywhere near is Ryanair. So I’ve plotted out the route using Eurostar and then trains from Paris to the nearest town. Good grief, they even have buses in France for the last leg . . .
It’ll no doubt work out a bit more expensive (not much, though, once you take into account Ryanair’s list of hidden charges) and take a bit more time. But it’ll make me feel better. And I’ll have all that train time to catch up on reading.
If something or someone pisses me off, I vote with my feet. I’ve changed banks twice as a protest against bad service. And I get fed-up with people saying ‘oh, it won’t make any difference if I stop flying Ryanair/shopping at Tesco/giving British Telecom my custom.’ Yes it will, just so long as other people decide they’re no longer rewarding bad service.
Those of us of a certain age will remember the boycott of Barclay’s Bank in the UK as a protest against its investments in apartheid era South Africa. It worked – mainly, I suspect, because the company realised that students boycotting the bank and voting against having branches of it on campuses across the country was going to be a major problem when the next generation of professionals had taken their custom elsewhere.
And in case you’re wondering what the hell this has got to do with books, the same applies to authors. We’ve blacklisted four writers on RTE because of unacceptable behaviour. And when they or their publicists have asked, we’ve told them why. Not being reviewed on one website probably won’t hit their sales hugely, but three of the four were mid-ranking writers who don’t get reviewed much elsewhere.
Anything that makes people think before they behave like arseholes is fine by me …
