i love easyjet

me, the mrs and sprog fly to toulouse on and off all year long. mrs johnnh's parents being natives. BA normally charge about 400ukp. easyjet is booked for the end of feb for £35 for wife and child for a long weekend. even the flights are at a reasonable hour. like i said - i love easyjet

john

 

having sleazy jet just up the road was about the olny good thing living in luton,£30 return to amsterdam,leave on the 6am flight and return at 10pm,a great day out,and the savings on the duty free fags and booze easily covered the ticket cost

 

You haven't seen airport/airline (or whatever it's called!) then ? After watching that program I don't think I would ever fly Easyjet.

...I'm sure that program only shows the bad stories though as it makes "entertaining TV"!

 

Don't think I've ever flown easyJet. Used to fly GO! (were they bought by easyJet?) for all my twice monthly flights to/from Lisbon but even before they stopped flying to Lisbon (now there are no budget airlines flying to Lisbon) I switched to BA. If I book early enough (1 month in advance is usually enough) my return flights to Lisbon are about £130-150 on average which compared to GO! prices of about £80 return. The issues I had with GO! though were:

a) flew from Stansted. Even though the office in London is in Canary Wharf it's far quicker (not to mention much more reliable) for me to get to Heathrow than it is to Stansted.

b) crap timetables. I used to have to take a flight at 4pm on the Sunday when returning to London. With BA I can take their 8:15am flight on the Monday morning and have a full weekend

c) crap service. Cramped seats (yes, even compared to BA) and 1 person doing checkins for 200 passengers. With BA I check in online. No queues, no hassle

d) when arriving at Lisbon always got crap "parking" stands miles from the terminal building. With BA you usually get the proper air ramp/walkway or whatever it's called.

All in all for close to double the price BA was definitely worth it. I can get air miles with BA too

Michael.

 

i'll defend sleazy jet,most of the problems showen on tv are the customers own fault,arriving late for check in,failing to read the rules ect,ive flowen with them numours times and the olny problems weve had are
1)outbound flight delayed for an hour,due to heavy snow at luton,not sleazy jets fault
2)return flight from amsterdam delayed by 2 hours due to a technical problem,but we were kept informed and even manged to get a free drink on the flight
However ive olny flowen air france twice,on the first occasion i was in philladelphia and my luggage was in paris,took them 2 days to deliver it and on the second occasion yep thats right i was in heathrow and my luggage was still in philly

 

Easyjest....last year £35 RETURN to Geneva for ski-ing. £11 a day carhire (even though it's a bit of a trek....). This year £50 return - a big increase..but £7 a day for the car..
Majorca in the summer with the kids (for peanuts)....kids /families get on the plane first...
How can you go wrong?

 

Last year I did Ryanair £40 return to Venice (Treviso) for skiing (in Cortina) which was an incredible deal. We had to rent a car but between 5 of us it was well worth it (cheaper than any bus or taxi alternatives).

When budget flights work they're great but I would still pay a bit extra for a "proper" airline with reserved seats, airports in the cities rather than between them and a bit of free food and drink

There are cases where the cost of getting from the turf airstrip in the middle of nowhere that these airlines tend to use to where you actually want to go can be as much or even more than the extra cost of using a regular carrier. OTOH it can work the other way too. In the case above, Treviso is actually a lot close to the Dolomites than Venice.

Michael.

 

Ah, but how many airlines actually give you an "exclusively" reserved seat rather than allow a certain (low) percentage of their seating to be double bookable? Am I talking double Dutch, or does anybody else have an inkling of what I'm about to talk about here?

Well, back in December 2002 I was booked on a Virgin Atlantic flight to New York (from Heathrow), yep and even had a pre-booked reserved seat number printed on my ticket stub before arriving at the airport. I arrived at check-in, a good 2 and three-quarter hours prior to flight time, not to mention spending at least 2 hours in the check-in queue... by the time myself and about a dozen other passengers who were left had reached the end of the queue, we were all told that the flight had been overbooked and that there were absolutely no seats left! Yes, we were told apparently that this is common practice within the industry, to allow a certain amount of a flight's seats to be overbookable, as often not 100% of the passengers turn up in most cases either due to late arrival or more commonly cancelling or not turning up at the last moment for whatever reason without prior arrangement. Well, it just so happened in this cases that they had gotten it very very wrong, and that every single ticket holder had indeed turned up.

Those of us who were left (the flight was already being held and was late for departure due to the extra long check-in queue), were told that we could either get a refund, or take the next available flight plus compensation. So I gladly took the offer of the next flight (in 2 hours time) plus the "compensation". Said compensation was a free open return ticket valid to any of Virgin's flight destinations. :MILD:

 

Have used Easy Jet a few times. On the whole seemed fine for the MOney.

The last we flew with them however, was september 2001. Flew from Barcalona to Amsterdam (Virgin),the day after (or possibly 2 days) the terrorist attacks on the States, which despite the expected and understandable delays, went ok. Spent some time in Amsterdam then flew with E-J back to London. The flight was over an hour late in arriving. Then checking in took forever, ontop of the added security measures. Then upon bording the plane we were sat for over an hour before being told we had to get off! There was engine damage and we were told we'd need to wait for a replacement plane as this one was unsafe to fly. Given a tea/coffee voucher and told to come back in a further hours time. Returned to the boarding area at the given time and had to wait for well over an hour again! We were told next to nothing.
It didn't help that there were alot of very pissed off people shouting and at one point looked like it was going to really kick off, but the worst thing was that the E-J staff were shite! They were obviously only going on the info they had, but they didn't let anyone know anything.

They ended up saying that the flight was safe despite not having been a while earlier and having done no repairs on it. Seemed like they were just looking to risk it due to the complaining/pressure. We'd also have to land at a different London airport. Not sure which, but everyone thought it was odd as that airport was further away! We'd have not got there till very late and would have been stranded.

A few (including us) said we'd wait for the first plane in the MOrning. They had all the luggage reMOved an laid out on the side for people to say if they wanted it back on the plane or to wait...... it just had to happen......... it absolutey pissed down! All our luggage out in the open and getting soaked. They made NO effort to get it sheltered (despite there being shelter a few meters away, and it was probably laying there in the rain for half hour+!!!

Those who stayed were told we'd be dealt with shortly.

Not one person made an effort to let us know what to do. We ended up sleeping in a freezing cold part of the airport. We'd had to go back out to organize the flight for the following MOrning, and were then unable to get back into the waiting area. Had a couple of soaked towels to keep us warm though..... which was nice.