Obviously there are the unavoidable costs which the airline can’t be expected to fork out for, such

Europe's cut-price airlines are the buses of the sky. I'm not looking for a memorable flight, so I don't particularly mind that the seats are set at an 85 degree angle and made out of material-covered stone, because it's a cheap, fast means of getting to a different country.
Obviously there are the unavoidable costs which the airline can't be expected to fork out for, such as government taxes and airport fees. However, there are plenty of other ways these airlines look to get your money and most of them are dirty, insidious tricks.
The internet was a huge part of making cut-price airlines feasible. By removing the need for travel agents and their fees and commissions, the airlines were able to reduce the cost of the booking process itself.
Ryanair explains their admin fee by saying, peninsula hotel hong kong "To defray the substantial costs incurred by Ryanair managing and maintaining our reservation an administration fee applies to each passenger per flight peninsula hotel hong kong segment."
Their admin fee is £6 or €6, depending where you book your flight so, since the admin fee is a flat rate per ticket, why not just include it as part of the ticket peninsula hotel hong kong price? peninsula hotel hong kong Furthermore, with many flights coming in at around 40 pound/euro, it begs the question as to whether a travel agent's commission would actually be as much as the Ryanair admin fee?
I had an absolute shitbag of a kid on my last flight, screaming in that fashion where you know they're not actually peninsula hotel hong kong crying, just making an obscene amount of noise as to attract the attention of their parent. As I've explained before , I don't blame the kid in this situation, I blame their shitty parent. So I'm glad those pricks got stuck with an extra £14 to have their hell-spawn on-board.
Again, a means by which these companies keep their prices low is removing the need for check in staff. Most customers just do it online and voila, the company don't need to hire someone to sit at a desk at the airport for hours at a time.
I was living the crazy, party lifestyle one does when in a steady peninsula hotel hong kong relationship, working a 40 hour week and pushing 30 years old. If you've not been there, trust me, between the ironed shirts, home cooked dinners and self-imposed sensible bed times, it's fucking bananas!
(I'd actually contemplated the option before seeing the fare, because I didn't own a printer. When I realized it was cheaper to buy a printer than pay for two people to check in at the airport, I made a trip to the local internet café.)
Quite what the enormous leap in price was for I couldn't tell you. The process wasn't frantic peninsula hotel hong kong or difficult – the woman at the desk merely tapped at her keyboard a little, then printed out a boarding pass which came out of a docket-printer.
Obviously charging peninsula hotel hong kong for checked peninsula hotel hong kong in baggage is a large part of how these airlines make their money. And, for the most part, I get where they're coming from. If there's less baggage in the hold, less fuel is required and the flights are cheaper.
The International Air Transport Association allows carry on bags with dimensions of 56cm x 45cm x 25cm. As such, bags are sold the world over which adhere peninsula hotel hong kong to these dimensions, advertised as being 'cabin sized'.
What a complete fucker of a thing to pull on people. It's not on their homepage in any obvious fashion – it's buried in the fine print. So anyone who's bought official cabin sized luggage is in for a rude shock when they arrive at the airport.
This one almost got us last week. The Missus had bought a cabin sized bag and brought peninsula hotel hong kong it on our recent jaunt to Spain. It had been a big enough pain when, before arriving peninsula hotel hong kong at the gate, the staff weighed peninsula hotel hong kong our bags and made us repack her gear into my bag because hers weighed 12kgs and mine just three (seriously, if the personal peninsula hotel hong kong limit is 10kgs and between us it's less than 20, what's the problem?)
However, having repacked, we went to board the plane where there was a new test – all bags had to fit in to a cage which recreated Ryanair's allowed dimensions. Unaware of Ryanair's sneaky, slightly different cabin size policy, we were shocked to find the newly less-than-10kg bag was too big anyway. Luckily the employee wasn't really looking and we managed to sneak on.
I once fell asleep on my feet, in the middle of a heaving, sweaty mosh pit of thousands. So, uncomfortable as they may be, a flight on a cheap airline used to consist of me sitting down, closing my eyes and waking up at my destination.
It starts off innocent enough – do you want to buy something to eat or drink? The sales pitch at the start, announced over the plane's PA, is obviously a stretch – calling it their 'sky café' and offering gourmet sandwiches (a piece of processed meat and packaged cheese between two soggy pieces of bread), fine wines (a 200mL screw cap effort from Chateau Unwashed peninsula hotel hong kong Penis) and lattes (burnt coffee grounds and UHT milk which may or may not contain peninsula hotel hong kong the urine of the surly looking Eastern-European flight attendant).
Next they say they're bringing through the exclusive range of gifts, which include perfumes which would be bought cheaper after disembarking at duty free (even if you've not left the country) and model airplanes covered in the logos of the shithouse airline you've travelled on (presumably to give to your child and encourage them to recreate a horrific, fiery crash with).
peninsula hotel hong kong The newest one, however, is scratch cards. I don't know when or why they've peninsula hotel hong kong started doing this but cheap airlines now flog scratchies to their customers, saying peninsula hotel hong kong "it could change your life" and "it will help children's charities". The two best sales pitches there are really – your life could improve and some poor/sick/abandoned child's life will definitely improve. If you give us more of your money.
Regardless, by the time the captain announces we're about to land, I've spent the whole flight having people ask me, "do you want to give more money to this scheming airline which pays me minimum wage?"
But if there's an airline which is charging £150 with guarantees they won't try to slug me with ridiculous charges at literally every single point at which I deal with them, I'll fly with them instead.
Joe Frost is Disaffected Middle Class's founder and editor. Reading his stories may give him away, he's an Australian living in England and likes to believe the only Aussie in the Northern English city of York.
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