Low-Cost Airlines Price-Cheating

Low-cost airlines are a nice thing: they give us cheap and no-frills travel, compared to traditional airlines. But recently, they are resorting to unfair practices in their pricing, showing false low base prices, then add on additional costs which cannot be avoided. This is plain cheating, and the European Union is already considering action against this and will outlaw this practise, as seen on 13.May in the Telegraph newspaper.

But this practise is still going on, as my recent purchase of a Jet2.com plane ticket shows: base price is £15.96. Then comes a taxes and charges fee of £109.00. Steep. Sure, the other regular airlines also do this, and their price also often is more than 50% tax and "charges". But then there is an additional charge for the baggage of £49.96. Then a £20 fee for checking-in online. So what if I would not check in? I would not be allowed to fly. So why is this fee put separately, instead of being included in the mandatory base price? That base price is pure fiction, is just there in order to look good (low) and to attract customers. And it is illegal, to lie to customers about the price of a product, as blatantly as Jet2.com does this here. There are still more fees: £7.00 for fuel supplement. Why is this not in the "taxes and charges" included? Payment card fee for £7.53. Maybe they want me to pay with cash? And then the final insult: a booking fee of £7.27. This fee is for the convenience of booking the flight. Maybe the next fee would be a luggage drop fee, for allowing to bring your baggage to the flight check-in desk. Or a gate-transfer fee, for the convenience of being brought by bus from the gate to the plane. Or...

Here is the screenshot of the fees from my web booking, in case anyone thinks I made this up:

Refreshing the Design of this Blog

It has been a while since I have posted on my blog. In the past 6 months I have posted more on Facebook, and also have tried out Google+. This led to a decline of my blog and Twitter activities.

Now I have chosen a new design for this blog. Also properly equipped with all the social networking buttons under each post. The people at Blogger have done a good job in the last year and have added many new features, such as these buttons, and also making new designs. Also there is now a feature in the template which allows to automatically format this blog content for mobile phones - this is very useful.

The app "BlogSpace"

This is my first post to this blog using a little app on the iPhone called BlogSpace. It gives me an overview of my various blogs on Blogger.com, and let's me post to each one. Seems to work fine so far. One slight negative issue is that the title field is difficult to click on - it is very close to the top, and one can easily hit the cancel button instead, when trying to enter a blog title.