Unstainable

I saw this in a travel agent window today whilst myself on holiday in Scotland and found it deeply troubling. The advert is offering 7 nights all inclusive in Cancun Mexico flying from Glasgow in on June 13^th (14 days time).

The return flight will be an overnight flight so the offer is in fact 6 nights in the resort, excluding the airfare this equates to £83 per night for an all inclusive resort. I did an internet search for a flight only deal and came up with £350 on Thomas Cook and fares starting at £766 for scheduled service airlines. In short there is no way that this holiday is being sold at anything other than a substantial loss for the tour operator.

I have been in the industry for over 20 years and have seen this sort of pricing many times and it always ends in tears, everyone in the supply chain is being squeezed on price to unsustainable levels as a result the holiday will be of a relatively low standard and probably not what the person buying it was expecting. The tour operator will be losing money on the holiday so at the end of the year, if they do this too often, it will be reflected in the financial results. Selling your product at less than the cost of production is never clever.

I have no idea what work conditions are being offered by the Hotel in Cancun but I would wager that they are substantially below “fair trade” wages and are likely to involve a lot more that 40 hours a week. Sadly I don’t suppose that the average “Joe Tourist” will give this a second thought.

So why do they do it? Well.... they will probably have entered into a commitment to fly from Glasgow to Cancun between May and September and they will have purchased a number of hotel rooms in Cancun. It is widely known in the industry that a seat on a flight that has already departed has no value. The tour operator will sell the seats and rooms for almost anything they can get as £500 of income is better than nothing at all. The problem is that the punter in the high street knows this and will wait for the last minute to buy the holidays as a result the tour operator ends up discounting even more packages and so on and so forth until it either “wakes up and smells the coffee” or goes bankrupt.

Either way I don’t see any winners from this sort of pricing and I feel very sorry for any UK based hotel trying to compete against this sort of stupid pricing and I hope it stops soon. If it was not going to cost so many jobs I would like to see this tour operator, whoever they are, go to the wall.

Conference bound

I am off to the annual Shindig of the IATA Ground Handing Committee, an umbrella body for the area of the industry that I work in. They usually have the conference in a nice “business” location, no Bali beaches for me. The conference traditionally runs from Sunday evening until Wednesday nights so inevitably I have to travel on the Saturday meaning another weekend away from the family. Disappointingly, to avoid a location clash with another industry conference, it is being held (again) in Kuala Lumpur where it was held in 2008. I would have much preferred the alternative location of Saigon in Vietnam. The flight schedule that I required meant that Singapore Airlines was the best fit, I have not flown Singapore Airlines since 2008 and I had forgotten how good they are. I spend an inordinate amount of time “up in the air” this flight (30^th April) will take me over 100 hours flown this year so far and I expect to finish up somewhere between 200 and 300 hours by the end of the year. Our company policy is the cheapest economy class ticket that fits with the schedule, regardless of flight duration, unless someone else is paying or we get a complimentary upgrade. As a result I consider myself something of an expert on airline service and Singapore Airlines top my list. The flight is 12:15 today, most long haul airlines would knock out a single drinks service followed by a meal, and they would then turn up the cabin temperature, hoping to send the passengers to sleep. The cabin crew would then retreat to the galley or cabin crew rest area perhaps coming through the cabin with a water service every hour. Before landing they would, if the flight is long enough, another meal would be served. Singapore Airlines is different..... After take off the crew distributed menus, we had two drinks services followed by a lunch service with three choices of main course. The water service is every half hour and they clean up the empty cups about 15 minutes later, there is a mid flight “movie snack” and finally before landing breakfast... with a twist. The breakfast choice is “Western” (full English) or Eastern (beef noodles). Given my body clock is coming up on midnight at “breakfast time” the beef noodles will go down a treat.

We are flying on the A380 today; it was once described to me as an A330 with another A330 stuck on top of it. Singapore airlines are the only A380 operator who has upper deck economy class; this is my preference as it is 2-4-2 and because of the curve of the fuselage there is a small hand baggage locker between the window and the seat. This time I was too late to get upper deck so I was relegated to the main deck where it is 3-4-3, I was in a window seat and fortunately the middle seat was empty; even more fortunately the passenger in the aisle seat moved after take off so I have a row of three to myself. The A380 is an engineering marvel and is my favourite aircraft type, it is so quiet and the Singapore In-flight entertainment is second to none, so far this flight I have managed to watch The social network, Get Carter and then listen to 101 hits of the 1980’s and we are only just approaching the Bay of Bengal. For a travel addict this is a good day.

Lost in Translation

One of the duty free shops in Hong Kong has been turned into an oxymoron. you cant have "free duty" or it would not be duty in the first place !!!