Stop Doing That!

Did you ever have one of those days when it seems like the world is messing with you? Like when you’re in the middle of telling someone that the mobile jumbotron (basically a flatbed truck with a thirty-foot television screen on either side, playing a variety of ads like the blimp in Blade Runner) is the worst idea ever, only to have the Strippermobile (essentially a large Plexiglas tank mounted on the back of a truck, with a stripper pole and several half-naked women inside it) drive past you? Or you claim that the individual you’ve just pointed to is wearing the most hideous necktie in human history, only to have someone else point to an even more reprehensible example on someone coming the other direction? When you write a blog about business topics, and particularly one that deals with business failures, this sort of thing happens a lot. But even so, it was kind of annoying to have to story about flying pay toilets break the day after I wrote in this space about airlines charging for carry-on luggage…

According to this story in the Mail Online, European discount carrier Ryanair has announced that it is going through with plans to put pay toilets on its aircraft; the company also says that it plans to remove most of the lavatories from its planes, leaving just one for every 200 passengers or so. In theory, this should save them the expense of maintaining and cleaning multiple lavatories, lower the cost of pumping the planes’ waste tanks (by encouraging people to go before they board or after the plane lands), and free up enough room to cram another half-dozen seats onto already cramped airliners. Whether or not there will be long-term consequences of these plans remains to be seen, of course…

The first question that comes to my mind is what does the airline intend to do about people who need to use the facilities but are unable to afford them? A one-pound fee (about $1.53 as of this date, although that changes from day to day) isn’t much, but it could add up over a long flight, and the people who fly no-frills airlines don’t tend to be especially flush in the first place. What about a family of five, for example, with three small kids who need to use the facilities a lot? Is it really fair to use a policy like this to squeeze, say, $20 worth of milk money out of them? My second question is, what are they going to do about people who really have to go but don’t have exact change on them? It’s already hard enough getting the cabin crew to make change for food and beverage purchases; what are you going to do about people who need lavatory change? Even more to the point, what are they going to do about people who have “accidents” because they have to go and can’t afford the pay toilet?

I’m not sure you could even pull a stunt like this in the U.S.; it seems like somebody would sue on the basis of this being unfair to people with medical conditions that make them have to use the toilet frequently, or people who can’t hold it for that long, or something. You can also imagine that the unions would kick up a fuss about maintenance personnel having to deal with biohazards when cleaning the cabin, or that other discount airlines would make a fortune off of mocking Ryanair for this policy while advertising that you don’t have to worry about having correct change when you fly their airline. It also seems like it would be difficult to develop much of a relationship with your customer base when you’re so clearly willing to demonstrate that you don’t really care about them…

The point is, I’m not trying to pick on the airline industry in particular; I don’t have any personal connection to the industry or any reason to mock them over the hundreds of other market sectors that appear to be sinking slowly into the swamp due to bad planning, laughable leadership and amateurish management practices. I didn’t even go looking for a follow-up to the last post; it just worked out that way. Like I said, some days it just seems like the world at large is messing with you…