Low Cost Essay Anglais

The first low-cost airline appeared in the USA in 1971, Southwest Airlines. In Europe it didn’t arrive until the 90’s with Ryan Air. Their rates are occasionally risible and their growing market share – if in 2001 they barely gather 4% of the seat offer of intercommunity market, in 2007 they assumed control of 28%- have allowed their recent blooming.

These airlines have appeared all around the world and they have changed the concept of flying. This phenomena has made conventional airlines fight against their high costs to be competitive, mostly of these cost cuts are done sacrificing quality. But how far do this cost reductions go? Should we be worried about our safety?

During the last decade, the low-cost air companies have been hurt by the rumors circulating about the deficiencies in their security controls and periodic reviews of their aircrafts. Also, incidents that have occurred as emergency landings due to lack of fuel, mechanical problems, alarms that do not work or depressurization cab, have raised the controversy over the safety of its flights. Despite this idea, safety standards in a traditional company and in a low-cost one for the aircraft’s operations are the same. The low-cost companies’ aircrafts are even 50% younger than those of traditional companies.

Their costs are specially optimized with direct sales of tickets to the final costumers without intermediaries, normally through Internet.

Smaller and cheaper airports are also used to reduce costs. They tend to be less congested thanks to what companies avoid delays. As there are less cabin services, fewer crewmembers are needed on board so wage expenses are reduced as well. Another example is that their planes fly more hours in order to depreciate their purchase costs.

Even if it doesn’t affect their safety, customers must be up to date on what risks they are taking when flying with a low-cost company. The issue about saving money in the ticket is that the customer service that hides behind is probably very questionable (even if the companies usually deny this fact). Costumers should know that if there is a problem, no one is going to fix it for them. Many complaints have being listed. Apparently as some users testified when you go to see company employees and expose your difficulties they just close the desk explaining that “sadly” they can’t do anything to help you.

Finally the low-cost airline companies are known for their cheap rates, which is actually not always the case. If we compared different prices of different companies for one same route we could observe that sometimes flying with a normal company is cheaper. That is when we consider that the final price is more economic than the one that results from the addition of the baggage charge, the credit card charge, etc. Not even the air is free when travelling with low cost. In many cases the client that uses a low-cost company doesn’t check this and pays the same or even more for his ticket and travels convinced that he paid much less that if he had travelled with another company.

Low- cost airlines have done a good marketing job here. They have managed, in some occasions, to sell a product more expensive than their competitors and make the client believe that he has paid less money for flying than if he had flown with a traditional company.

To conclude, despite

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