The idea is to simplify and lower air passenger duties (very topical just now) and set the levels based on customer service quality (i.e. ‘A Ryanair Tax’).
This would make Flying and Family Holidays more affordable and much less stressful.
With Mad Miliband and his communist cronies planning enormous hikes (https://www.gbnews.com/money/labour-holiday-tax-raid-family-flights) to air taxes, British families could soon be deprived of yet another pleasure, a holiday in the Sun.
Since Air Passenger Duty was introduced in 1994, it has risen exponentially and become ever more complicated. And while air travel has expanded enormously over the same period, it has also become a more stressful, less pleasant experience.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to make flying great again. We reduce overall air taxes, and charge them based on customer service.
Every time you took a flight, you would receive a text message asking you to rate the airport and the airline based on customer service. The higher your rating, the lower the tax and the more of your ticket price the airline/airport gets to keep. But if the service is terrible and you give them a low rating, the tax levels would be punitive. Ryanair look out! In the future, terrible customer service could quickly put you out of business!
Of course, it’s not just Ryanair, but every one of us has stories of terrible air travel experiences. Rude security staff, mile long queues, being herded into cattle pens for hours, forced to pay daft charges or staff refusing to help after cancelling the flight. For decades airlines and airports have got away with it.
The fundamental problem with air travel is it does not function as a normal competitive industry. Let’s say I go to Tesco, and their Granny Smith apples are overpriced and rotten. I can just buy a different type of apple, or go to another supermarket nearby.
But with air travel it does not work that way. If I need to fly from Nottingham to Lyon on Saturday morning, I cannot substitute that for a flight from Stanstead to Paris on Wednesday. There might be plenty of flights on offer but in reality there is rarely any choice. That is why airlines are often described as ‘quasi-monopolies.’
Worst of all, often they are actually incentivised to do a bad job. Ryanair’s entire profit model is based on confusing pricing. The reason airports are taking years to update the rules around liquids is that they make money from them - forcing you to pay inflated prices after you go through security. Delays are the same: the longer you are trapped in the airport, the more you have to spend.
And it really is worse in the UK: thanks to our economic and population crises, British airports have been falling down the international league tables, while other nations’ travellers enjoy ever more luxury. This is one of the most commonly cited reasons for opposing Heathrow’s expansion: why have more of something that is terrible?
With my new ‘Ryanair Tax’, we can change all that. Because air travel profit margins are so small, even a modest tax (lower than current APD) would massively incentivise airports and airlines to treat us well. Our complaints would actually count: with one swipe we could cost them more than their entire profit on our ticket. In an instant, airlines would go from rude monopolies to innovative service providers, eager to meet our every need.
This is classic PAC policy: it takes an innovative lower tax and people-power to bring market based competition to the industry.
Thanks for reading x
