More than a year back, I had suggested a few ideas to make low cost airlines profitable. No one has been smart enough to follow the strategies I suggested, but they are slowly moving towards implementing them.
Ryanair is trying, and so are some US airlines. First they wanted to charge fat passengers for two seats. They took the idea from me. It was only a modification of my earlier plan to charge pregnant women for two tickets. Ryanair once made a proposal of charging passengers for using toilets. Of course, that was my idea too. Now, they want to charge super steep additional fee of 40 euros to use check-in counter to print boarding pass. Obviously it’s a small modification of my proposal to allot seat numbers for those who pay extra.
Now that I see people taking up to my idea, I have a new career in mind. Meet Mr.Arun, the low cost career consultant. My mission is to eventually make flying free for all. And my vision is to stay highly profitable by recovering the cost of tickets by some forward-thinking strategies. Here is one for example: Some airlines are currently charging for checking in first baggage. No one seems to have been thinking of charging for retrieving checked baggage! You get the drift?
Some low-cost airlines have now decided to levy service charges for booking tickets on the net. Low cost carriers have been getting innovative about making money in the last one or two years. Some airlines in the west have worked towards charging the passengers for second check-in baggage, and some are letting you reserve a seat for an extra fee. Now all the domestic airlines have learned to sell tickets for Rs.100 and then add some Rs.2400 in taxes on that; impressive indeed. Unfortunately, competition is high and the costs are also going up, which means these airlines are struggling even with all these new fees. In comes the genius, yours truly, to help these airlines identify more options to make passengers to pay up.
1. Lock the toilets. If anyone wants to use the loo, make them pay at least a $100 to let them in. They have no choice but to give in. Another option was to remove the loo and put some seats there, but it would be needed for emergencies.
2. Ask pregnant women to buy two tickets.
3. Disable the reclining backrests. If you need to push it back, pay up. Capable airlines can go one step ahead and program the backrests. The more you pay, the more it reclines. Pay a dollar to recline it by one degree, $10 to recline it by ten degrees and so on. If you hate the guy in the row behind you, you can make his life miserable by paying $90. If any one complains, give them a toothy air-hostess smile, absolutely free of cost as a goodwill measure and promotional. They can even attach a credit card reading machine to the seats.
4. Make the passengers carry their check-in baggage to the aircraft and load it into the luggage compartment. That saves the expenses of a few employees. Same goes with unloading.
5. This is for Air Deccans of the world who don’t provide a seat number, and make people run to catch a seat. If the aircraft windows could be slid open, they would have probably permitted towel reservations. I wonder why they can’t allot seat numbers to passengers, at least on humanitarian grounds. If that requires investing a few thousand dollars on software, they could do it manually. Neighbourhood private bus operator does it for us by keeping a printed layout sheet and marking manually on them, but the airlines must be too sophisticated for that. Okay, coming back to how they can make money, they can allot a seat for those who pay. And they can also provide right to board first for some more money(Just searched on the internet, some European airlines are already doing this!)
6. Food and water have been commercialized already. The next thing humans need for surviving is air. Aircrafts require compressed air supply. Just stop the supply at midair and ask for money from everyone.
7. Sell bus tickets for the buses that carry passengers from aircraft to terminal and vice versa. Don’t forget to charge extra for luggage.
Safety standards require that every passenger be given a seat. How sad is that? Without the regulations, they could have sold standing seats, with seats costing extra. I can assure that it works. Someone tried an April Fool joke about selling standing room, and they had lot of people falling in line!
Do you have any ideas for the budget airlines that are loosing money?
One of the most common entities on the Indian Highways, along with the dhabas, are the puncture shops. But when was the last time you saw puncture spelled correctly? The signs comes in various permutations and combinations, always ensuring that it is never spelt p-u-n-c-t-u-r-e.
There is punchur, punchar, punchur and a few other combinations. Some times it gets simplified and Indianized as panchar, which sometimes sounds right to me. Indianized because that’s how we spell our names. I remember a conversation that an American was having with a friend Roshan. He said, “the way your name is pronounced, it should be spelt R-o-s-h-u-n.” Roshan had some explaining to do about subtle differences in the way his name is pronounced and s-h-u-n gets pronounced.
Customization is the name of the game when it comes to English in India. It is not UK or US, but India that has the largest population of people who can speak English. Our love of English is well known, but we have never been able to accept the language as it is, and have customized it to our will to an extent that might often sound funny to a native speaker. Now we are even ready to claim some derived languages such as Hinglish, or Kanglish as we call in Bangalore. Can you believe it, a large number of slangs in Kannada are actually in English and the words hardly relate to their original meaning!
I am not sure how a British would comprehend the saying “yes, no?” And then we have some more well known phrases like “It is like that only.” There was a much circulated email which carried the photo of a shop selling Chilled Beer with a sign that read ‘child bear’! Some times it can get really interesting. I recall a lady speaking loudly and giving directions on the mobile phone in otherwise quiet queue in an ATM center, which went like this – “that no, you know that ice-cream shop in MG Road no, from there you go straight down and left, you will find a jewellery shop-pu, got it no, ya there only..” There was much more depth to her speech than what I have recalled and jotted down here. I felt it was more of Kannada that she was speaking. Kannada words were generously interspersed in the conversation and it was evidently a chat between two Kannadigas who were heavily processed by our English schools but refused to give up their real identity.
Coming back to the topic of puncher shops, from which I have now digressed very far, I tend to keep an eye on the spellings when I am travelling. Not because I am a purist, but it is fun to see the combinations that get used. One of the interesting things I have seen is – all those ‘puncher’ shops usually manage to spell a much more complex word like ‘vulcanizing’ correctly. That makes me wonder if there is a deliberate conspiracy against the word puncture. Or is it just that truck drivers prefer shops where the spelling is more friendly? Then there was a music shop in Tawang that carried some special offer for ‘cupples’ for valentines day. After punchur shops, the best place to look at is in the restaurant menu in small towns and highways. One such place in UP offered ‘cornflex’ and ‘mashroom’ to its customers. And another place offered Veg Pakodas but when it came to sandwich, they decided to make it ‘vage’. Sandwich itself some times come in many varieties like ‘sandwhich’ and ‘sandwitch’, all of them adding some fun to the food!
The last time I wrote something about such English in our country, some one got angry and grumbled – “It is a ‘phoren’ language and we don’t need to perfect it. I am very fluent and perfect in my mother tongue and I don’t see a need to be good in anything else”. I had then not replied to the comment. But I agree that there is no need to get perfect in English, or anything else for that matter, especially when there is so much fun in imperfections. In any case, I have no complaints or nothing really against corrupting English, and nor have I gone anywhere in search of perfection. Why take things seriously when there is much more value addition in the lighter side of things?
Footnote: One of the greatest writer that Kannada has seen – Poornachandra Tejaswi always had a tough time with English and always used to fail in English language tests in college. He once remarked something like this – “I don’t think I will ever manage to understand English or any language that uses spellings. These people write something and pronounce it totally differently. It’s crazy.”