In defence of Ryanair

Oh we do love to hate Ryanair. Low-cost airline? Pah! It’s a nasty little organisation, always looking for sneaky ways to charge customers more.

You could hear the sigh of whatever-next exasperation/outrage yesterday as the Mail brought out the “Now” word to report the company’s latest luggage policy – to revert to its old practice of allowing only one free item per passenger. “Now Ryanair charges you for hand luggage”. Note the neat use of “you”, so readers know exactly who the victim is here.

The report would certainly comply with the Editors’ Code standards of accuracy, but the tone is hostile. Passengers who turn up at the gate with two bags will have to put one in the hold, and face the “inconvenience” of having to collect it from the baggage carousel at their destination.
“Ryanair warned that anyone who refuses to put one of their carry-on bags in hold - for example because it contains valuables - will be blocked from travelling and will not be entitled to a refund.” 
Classic Mail, accentuating the negative.

But it was far from alone. For The Times “Millions of passengers will be stopped from taking wheeled luggage into the cabin of Ryanair flights amid claims that the current allowances are being abused by travellers.”

See! Millions of victims, while the airline’s explanation is presented as a “claim”, ie, something to be questioned.

So, too, is its marketing chief, who is seen “insisting” all over the place that this isn’t a money-making exercise. The inference being “in the face of all the evidence”. As the Mail reminds us: “Ryanair has frequently been criticised for the extra charges it levies on customers."

It also finds someone from an organisation called Fairer Finance to say: “This is a problem Ryanair created for themselves. By charging people a lot of money to check in bags, everybody has tried as hard as possible to avoid this. After years of treating customers with contempt, many will be suspicious of this.”

Here’s the Telegraph: “Ryanair is banning passengers from using weekend and wheelie bags as hand luggage, over claims that customers are abusing its "two items" rule and causing delays. From Nov. 1, millions of Ryanair passengers will be forced to put standard-sized hand luggage in the hold, unless they cough up £10 per return flight for priority boarding.”

There are those millions again. And now there’s a ban. And they’re being “forced” to put luggage in the hold or “cough up” ten quid. Again, all of that would probably pass muster with the Code’s accuracy clause, except there is no ban – or “bar”, as Metro puts it in its headline. You can still take those wheelie bags in the cabin if you’re prepared to pay.

Still, at least the Telegraph takes the trouble to compare baggage allowances with other airlines. The Mail, too, grudgingly admits that Easyjet allows only a single free bag and that passengers who want to take a second on board have to pay for extra legroom. Do you remember the headlines about this policy? No, nor do I. But paying for extra legroom isn’t the same is paying for priority boarding. Not least because Easyjet’s extra legroom seats cost £14.99 or £15.99. 

The Express also has “ban” in its intro, and the Mirror also makes passengers “cough up” a fiver per trip, but the i, Guardian and FT all manage to tell the story accurately and straight, and the Sun hits the nail on the head with its headlines (with the toughest count of all): “Airline 2nd bag charge” and “Ryanair axe freebie”.

I travel on Ryanair a lot. There are irritations.

It is virtually impossible to change a flight because the administrative charge makes it uneconomical: it’s almost always cheaper to write off the unwanted flight and rebook.

Customer service is a nightmare: it costs a fortune to talk to a person. But the fact that it’s an English-speaking business based on the British Isles leads us to forget that Ryanair is a foreign carrier, so contacting it involves international calls. Would we be as grumpy about expensive call charges if we were trying to contact Lufthansa or SwissAir?

And those bloody scratchcards – “your chance to help children’s charities” - and the fanfare when the flight touches down on time. Spare us, please!

Oh yes, there are irritations. But I’m still a pretty satisfied customer. And on abuse of the luggage allowance, Ryanair is absolutely right.

Those suitcases on wheels are a menace. I blame Alan Sugar and The Apprentice. It’s one thing for 16 wannabe tycoons to totter/swagger across London Bridge with their bags in tow, but when it comes to thousands sauntering through the departure lounge…

It is perfectly possible to wheel such a case alongside you, but no, most trail it behind them, oblivious to the hazard it poses to people behind. It’s like a dog walker who has no idea what her pooch is doing until the lead tautens and she turns to find it having a poo or sniffing a Labrador. These cases weigh at most 10kg, what’s wrong with picking them up? It’s supposed to be carry-on, not drag-on luggage.

The diehards won't lift their bags even when they board the plane, insisting on wheeling them down the aisle. And then there’s the general kerfuffle as they’re heaved up into the lockers.

Yes, Ryanair is right about the abuse and the delays. The rule used to be one bag per person. That was eased to allow a handbag/laptop case as well – possibly in response to complaints from airport shops who presumably lost potential sales because people wouldn’t be able to take their Ted Baker or Oasis bag in addition to their wheelie case/holdall. Signs popped up all over Stansted Airport saying “All airlines, including Ryanair, now allow a second bag” as an encouragement for waiting passengers to spend, spend, spend.

Whether they did or not, I don’t know. But I do know that people started turning up at the gate not with a cabin bag and a little handbag, but with two big bags. I also know that cabin crew struggle to get people on and off the planes as speedily as they used to. For a while they have been inviting passengers to put a bag in the hold for free, but it seems too few of us have done so, so now the airline is offering a financial deterrent – and a financial incentive, although yesterday’s coverage gave that less emphasis.

The new rules

So, with interests I hope disclosed, may I attempt a straight interpretation of the new Ryanair policy.

1: Passengers will be allowed to carry one bag with them without charge, as was the case until three years ago. This bag will, however, have to be smaller than it was under the previous one-bag policy.

2: Passengers will be allowed to put one bag weighing up to 10kg in the hold without charge. They will not have to check this in. They can simply drop it at the gate.

3: Passengers will be allowed to take two bags into the cabin if they pay £5 for priority boarding.

4: The check-in luggage allowance is being increased by 25% to 20kg and the charge being cut by 28% from £35 to £25. That represents a 46% price reduction in terms of kilos per £..

Case study

And here’s an attempt at a comparison of what the cost of flying to southwest France on Monday would be if the new charges were in place. The Easyjet service goes from Gatwick to Toulouse, Ryanair's from Stansted to Bergerac. Easyjet's cheapest fare for the trip is £36.49, Ryanair's £14.99.

Total cost with two carry-on bags, one checked 20kg bag, extra legroom/speedy boarding: Easyjet: £67.48; Ryanair: £54.99 (under the present regime, this combination would cost £64.99.)

With two carry-on bags, premium seat/priority boarding, no hold luggage: Easyjet: £51.48; Ryanair: £29.99 (unchanged).

With one big carry-on bag: Easyjet (without speedy boarding) : £36.99; Ryanair (including priority boarding): £19.99.

With one small carry-on bag: Easyjet: £36.99; Ryanair: £14.99

With one small carry-on bag, 10kg bag in hold: Easyjet: £52.99. Ryanair: £14.99.

There are so many permutations. But the bottom line is that Ryanair almost always offers the lowest fare for people who just want to get on a plane, land on time and get to where they want to be with minimum fuss. Michael O’Leary once said he wanted travel on his airline to be like getting on and off a bus. It’s supposed to be no-frills. That’s the business model. If you want extra bits, you can pay for them, but don’t expect everyone else to pay for them too. 

Hence the joke about charging to use the loo. The inevitable furore followed, but it was never going to happen. The idea was to convince passengers “to go” before starting their journey, just as parents do before loading their children into the car, in the interests of efficiency and a smooth flight.

Mr O’Leary may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but – as the Times and Telegraph reports point out – millions of people use his services. In fact, it can fairly be called Europe's favourite airline, since it has the most passengers: 117m  last year, against BA's 100m and Easyjet's 70m. This is, of course why the papers are so interested in everything it does - and why the Express and Mirror were wrong to treat the announcement as a business, rather than consumer, story and put it at the back of the book.
Sometimes it seems that O'Leary prefers to treasure the reputation as our least-favourite airline. Blaming your customers for the introduction of a new charge is not good PR. Ryanair doesn’t do good PR.

What would be the point when the Press has already made up its mind before a word has been uttered? After all, who would read a story that said "Chuck your bag in the hold for nothing, without having to turn up early to check it in"? Or "Ryanair slashes baggage charges by 46%"?

As another Irishman from way back would say: it's the way they tell 'em.

The Press v Google - or pots v kettles

You could almost touch the schadenfreude as big-name advertisers walked away from YouTube after finding themselves appearing alongside extremists.
 "At last!" proclaimed a Daily Mail leader hailing the "fightback against web anarchy". Google (which owns YouTube) rightly stood accused of profiting from hatred, it said:

Day after day, the already deeply tarnished reputations of the filth-peddling, tax-dodging terror-abetting internet behemoths sink lower into the mire.

For many years, Google, Facebook and Twitter had wilfully turned a blind eye to poisonous content, it continued. But now the day of reckoning had arrived. The BBC and Whitehall had pulled their ads. And when banks, supermarkets and Marks & Spencer joined the exodus, there was more from Dominic Lawson on the "utter shamelessness of the filth-peddling web giants".

For The Times, which set the ball rolling with an investigation by Alexi Mostrous, this was the "shaming of Google", which should now face up to its responsibilities. The alternative was "an unacceptable role as an accessory to barbarism".

The Mail and the Murdoch stable hate the internet giants because they think they are stealing their revenue and readers. Having had the field to themselves for more than 200 years, newspapers resent the interlopers. Free marketeers all, they just can't stand competition. It's the same as their gripes against the BBC (publicly funded left-wing propaganda - just look at that anti-Brexit Countryfile with the farmer saying he'd go under without migrant fruit pickers) but writ larger.
Essentially, their cry is "It's not fair!"

Murdoch titles dominate the British print media and his Sky channels dominate the satellite television market. The Sun and Times reach 31 million people a month, according to the National Readership Survey, and figures from the British Audience Research Bureau suggest that the Sky channels between them achieved a total audience of about 8 million last week. The Mail is the most successful news website in the world and its print and online offerings now reach 29 million a month. But they want more.

Murdoch not only wants full control of Sky, but he wants the opposition nobbled. Having moved into BT's world of telephones, he started complaining - through his newspapers - that it was anti-competitive for BT to have control of the cabling. And when a deal was reached with Ofcom for Openreach to be hived off as a separate company under the same umbrella, that still wasn't enough. He wants an enforced sale.
The "respectable" argument is that BT is failing to invest enough in improving broadband speeds - a view that SubScribe wholeheartedly endorses - but it's hard not to notice that BT Sport has been outbidding Sky for key football rights.

The fight with Google goes back even further, with Murdoch threatening in 2009 to remove his newspapers' content from the search engine in a row over free access. That was followed in 2014 by News Corp's appeal to the much-derided European Commission for action to combat what it called "a platform for piracy". Then came the furore over tax in January last year. Mostrous, who had been honoured for his work on celebrity tax avoidance in 2015, was again on duty for The Times, showing how little tax Google paid and how the Government had failed to get as much as other European countries out of the company.
It was a legitimate investigation - if a bit rich from a paper whose parent company had previously managed to pay not a penny of UK corporation tax on billions of pounds of income over a period of 11 years.

The latest assault is also a valid inquiry - the speed with which MPs and big businesses responded proves as much - and it has thrown up three distinct strands:

• the content itself;
• the algorithms that place advertisements alongside extremist videos;
• the fact that money generated by the ads goes to the video makers and so funds extremism

One of the biggest beefs of the Mail and the Sun is that the internet is not regulated. British newspapers, they say, are subject to the toughest regulatory system in the world. They invest money in journalism and strive for accuracy, but their very existence is being imperilled by people like Gary Lineker who can reach millions with a tweet that turns out to be misinformed. And don't get them started on fake news. (Well, actually, they’ve already started with the News Media Association’s submission to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s inquiry saying there should be a government investigation into Facebook and Google – but “don’t bring in any new rules for us”).

The Mail warmed to that theme in its leader on Saturday, accusing the web giants of ruthlessly invading the privacy of their users by gathering and exploiting personal information, going on: "Meanwhile, endless fake news and blatant libels are spread with impunity around the world."

Impunity? They must have short memories in Kensington, for only days before the Mail Online's own columnist Katie Hopkins had to pay libel damages and costs over a tweet.

For a technophobe who does not use a computer, Mail editor Paul Dacre seems remarkably well-informed about the "vile" material all over the web and its malign effects on society. His newspaper has run hundreds of stories on the subject and appears to be of the opinion that all such material – porn, fanaticism, body-shaming - should be removed. Yes, some of it is execrable, but wouldn’t that be censorship, an attack on free speech?

The advertisers seem more concerned about their good name than about removing content from the web. They don't want to be associated with inappropriate material. If Google cleans up its algorithms, they'll go back.

Then there's the notion that advertisers and their customers (and, in the case of Whitehall and the BBC, the taxpayer) are inadvertently funding hate because a proportion of the fees they pay ends up in the hands of the people producing the page on which their ad appears.
The papers say this adds up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Google says it is "pennies".
[SubScribe can attest to the fact that Google is not exactly generous in sharing the proceeds of web ads with the page producers, but then again SubScribe does not get millions of views, so please click on an ad or two!]

So the Mail could be said to be in favour of the ad boycott to force the removal of material that spreads hate and fear.

Wait a minute. Funding hate? Ad boycotts? Material that spreads hate and fear? Doesn't all that sound familiar?

For the past eight months a group called Stop Funding Hate has been trying to persuade household names not to advertise with the Mail, Sun and Express while they continue to run so many anti-immigration stories. It chose those three papers because they were called out by the UN for the tone of their coverage. The organisation - which has just raised more than  £100,000 through a crowd-funding appeal to expand its work - argues that it is not good for companies to be associated with such a material, that the newspapers are profiting from spreading hate and fear, and that by advertising with the newspapers, advertisers are effectively using their customers' money to fund those hate messages.

This is what the Mail had to say in a leader about that:

A more malicious threat comes from Left-wing campaigners who seek to blackmail firms into withdrawing advertising from newspapers with which they disagree.
Particular targets are those, like the Mail, which voice public concerns about mass unrestricted immigration and the wanton waste of taxpayers' money on overseas aid, while the elderly and vulnerable suffer at home.
But with fair-minded companies refusing to be bullied by groups such as Stop Funding Hate, this assault on free expression can also be overcome.

Thus far, only Lego and the Body Shop have shown tangible support for the SFH campaign. Most other advertisers, including some that have pulled away from Google, have responded along the lines that they have no say in what appears near their ads.
But their reaction to the Google "scandal" proves that they think they do - or at least that they do not want to be seen next to material that runs counter to their brand image. That is exactly the judgment SFH is asking them to make about the newspapers.

Let’s be clear:

• It is censorship for campaigners to ask advertisers to influence the mindset - as opposed to the specific content - of newspapers.
• It is not censorship for the Press to demand that Google removes material from its platforms.
• It is not censorship for advertisers to seek to influence what appears on Google’s websites.

Come on! That’s obtuse! You know that a radical cleric who has been banned from the country preaching jihad is far more dangerous than a newspaper telling you that migrants take all new jobs - even if the 120pt splash caps heading and story are wrong. One is a threat to Western democracies, the other is an honest mistake made in the rush of getting important information across to readers who need to know. And newspapers own up and correct their errors (months later, in 8pt on page 2 or 32).

Of course it's all a question of scale. There are some really bad people on the web advocating some really nasty stuff. We can see how lives could be put at risk, so it's an easy call for M&S to say it doesn't want to be shown alongside real people with real guns and bombs (as opposed to the ones in Homeland).
It's harder to take a stand against a stream of prejudicial headlines, especially when those headlines are delivering the very Middle England readership it wants to talk to. But there is evidence from a number of respected sources, not simply lobbyists, that lives are being blighted - and possibly endangered - by some of things printed in our newspapers. A lot of blind eyes are being turned.

Richard Wilson, who set up SFH, is encouraged by this week's developments, saying:

We think it's brilliant that there is now a serious discussion about hate speech and about the responsibility of advertisers to acknowledge their role in it. Obviously this is a major concession from the previous position of insisting that any suggestion advertisers should consider these things was an abuse of free speech. Even the Mail now accepts that advertisers do have to think about this and act accordingly.

The Mail would naturally argue that that it does not print "hate speech". But here's a thing.  In listing obviously offensive and extremist videos from "terror groups, neo-Nazis and homophobes", the Mail reported:

An investigation by The Times found that the Home Office, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force all had advertising promotions placed beside video rants from 'shock-jock' Michael Savage, who infamously told one gay caller he should 'get Aids and die'.

The often-offensive Savage Nation podcasts pull no punches, but they come with a health warning of "adult content, adult language and psychological nudity", and they are sufficiently mainstream for the presenter to have been inducted into the radio hall of fame last November.
If it is reasonable for advertisers not to want to be associated with his output, what about the output of a woman (Katie Hopkins) who calls refugees cockroaches or a man (Kelvin MacKenzie) who thinks it's outrageous for a newsreader wearing a hijab to report on a terrorist attack  - both "vindicated" by the toughest newspaper regulator in the world?

Postscript:

In taking the Google story on from the Times's findings, the Mail also reported that Google, Facebook and Twitter had been "branded morally bankrupt for hosting thousands of images showing youngsters how to starve themselves or self-harm". It helpfully reproduced a photograph of a thin young woman. There is a real problem of mental health issues among teenagers and pro-anorexia sites exacerbate it. The Mail has written a fair bit about the tyranny of fashion and size zero models, but it would never do anything to make women worry about their body image, would it? This collection was taken from half - yes half - of yesterday's "sidebar of shame".


And one last thing:


The Mail also reported  concerns about Google's "political clout" and its "cosy relationship" with Whitehall, as evidenced by  figures showing that the company had at least 27 meetings with ministers in the 17 months after the 2015 election. There was also a "revolving door" that had seen at least 26 Whitehall staff hired by Google in the past decade.
Murdoch made a similar point in January last year, when he tweeted that Google was infiltrating Downing Street and the Obama White House.

Those Google meetings included one with David Cameron and another with Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. Over the same time period, executives of  News Corp held 20 meetings with senior government ministers, 18 of them with the Prime Minister, Chancellor or Culture Secretary. Murdoch attended seven. His chief executive, the former Times editor Robert Thomson, was at eight.

Pots and kettles.


SubScribe has analysed coverage of immigration and related issues over 2016. You can read about the front pages here and about the white-top inside pages here.

The Mail and the medallist's mother

A headline in Wednesday's Daily Mail stopped me in my tracks - and not because the question mark was in the wrong place.

Could the paper be showing contrition for running a solo picture of Tom Daley on its front page the previous day?
No chance. The intro immediately disabused me of that notion - and took my breath away:

Her son may just have won an Olympic bronze medal, but that didn't stop Dan Goodfellow's mother from finding something to complain about

Sharon Goodfellow had tweeted surprise when the Daily Telegraph's front page, featuring a photograph of Tom Daley without his diving partner, popped up on the #tomorrowspaperstoday Twitter feed on Monday evening.
The Mail hadn't arrived at that point.

@suttonnick I am very surprised by this photo. Is it for real? I am Dan's mum

— Sharon Goodfellow (@goodfellowshar1) August 8, 2016

Mrs Goodfellow's reaction stirred a bit of a Twitter breeze, inspiring 84 retweets and 170 "likes" and 20 or 30 comments that were universally supportive. One Twitter user contacted SubScribe to note that three papers had cropped Goodfellow out of a medals photograph. They hadn't. The Express went for Adam Peaty, while the Telegraph and Mail opted for  the Daley beefcake shot.

All of which made an interesting diversion and provided some material for breakfast TV and radio teams seeking something fresh for Tuesday morning.

By Wednesday, Team GB had won more and shinier medals, the world had moved on.
But not the Daily Mail.
To borrow a phrase, our athletes may just have won a clutch of Olympic medals, but that didn't stop the Mail finding someone to complain about. And in the process puncture a family's celebration.

A woman had dared to criticise the Press and question the editorial judgment of another newspaper that had made the same call as the Mail itself. This allowed it to attack both Mrs Goodfellow and another rival paper - The Times - which it didn't name. Here's a bit more of the story:

Sharon Goodfellow, 53, was incensed by media coverage of her son's success after he came third alongside Tom Daley in the synchronised diving.
Mrs Goodfellow bemoaned the fact that despite the divers being equal partners in the event, the British Press had just printed pictures of Mr Daley, 22, on their front pages.
One newspaper even left out and her 19-year-old son Mr Goodfellow's name [sic] altogether, writing as a sub-heading: "Daley and synchronised partner stunned as they claim dramatic diving bronze".

It later adds that Mrs Goodfellow had thanked Gabby Logan for "getting in touch with one broadsheet asking them to amend the sub-heading".

That paper was The Times, which had  not only fixed the omission, but also had a Matthew Syed comment piece about under-recognised "junior" sporting partners up on its website before Logan's Twitter reprimand.

@GabbyLogan we have Gabby. A bit of leeway for how close to deadline we are trying to get these Olympic papers out though! #manic

— ALEX KAY-JELSKI (@AlexKJTimes) August 8, 2016

It was a sorry error, and sports editor Alex Kay-Jelski was contrite.
Unlike the Mail.
The Times's ill-considered sub-head was on the back page, under two photographs of Goodfellow and Daley and a caption which named both (the paper had bizarrely preferred to make a "cultural" point about beach volleyball attire on its front).
Take another look at that cutting from the Daily Mail's front page at the top of this post. It focuses solely on Daley. It doesn't even say that he had a partner in a "doubles" event, let alone name him. Goodfellow did make it to the intro of the page 6 story - but Daley alone is headline material.

So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that the story about the mother who "found something to complain about", the woman who was "bemoaning", "incensed" and "irritated", didn't mention the fact that the Mail was also guilty of airbrushing Goodfellow out of the limelight.

The Mail has some pet terms for people who refuse to acknowledge what it sees as the error of their ways.
"Shameless", for example. And "arrogant".
It is also known to demand "Now say sorry!"
I think the cap fits, Mr Dacre.

PS: that cultural divide

It's easy to bash the Mail, but if you're looking for a volleyball picture to demonstrate the "cultural contrast" (as the Times calls it), isn't this one from the same spread as the Daley-Goodfellow story better?

June front pages

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You can see all this year's front pages by clicking on the tab at the top of the page or looking at the monthly archive list on the right. May's front pages are here