In the olden days, press releases landed at The Independent travel desk with a thump. By the sackload. The analogue predecessor of repeatedly hitting the delete key involved painstakingly opening each envelope, skimming the first couple of lines of the announcement and then binning it.
In October 1995, though, one press release caught my eye. “EasyJet £29 airfare makes flying as affordable as a pair of jeans” read the headline. The fact that the message was printed on bright orange paper helped it stand out, too.
Reading on, it seemed that The EasyJet Airline Company planned to revolutionise aviation in the UK.
“The airline is starting three daily services (two daily at the weekend), with Boeing 737s, between London Luton and Glasgow International Airport on 10 November 1995, and three daily services (two daily at the weekend) to Edinburgh will commence two weeks later on 24 November 1995.”
It seemed sadly obvious to me that, as with so many airline start-ups before and since, the venture was doomed to failure. A one-way fare of £29 from London to either of the two biggest Scottish cities was preposterously low. The prevailing lowest return fare from Heathrow, on both British Airways and its rival British Midland, was over £100. And those incumbents made a fortune by charging hundreds of pounds return for business travellers who were not staying in Scotland over a Saturday night.
“We have spent a lot of time researching how to make our fares affordable to everyone while making air travel convenient and fun,” said the chairman and chief executive, Stelios Haji-loannou.
EasyJet made clear that £29 was the lead-in price, and that fares could rise as high as £59. Yet this was a fraction of the sums commanded by its established competitors. What’s more, the airline didn’t seek to segment the market by insisting on that despised “Saturday night stay” rule for cheap tickets. Whether you chose to visit London from Edinburgh for a day, or fly one way and take the train the other, the fare stayed the same.
There’s undercutting, and there’s commercial suicide, I concluded. The only question was how long easyJet could survive before the cash ran out. Initially, it had to borrow planes. The Boeing 737s were chartered in from another airline, GB Airways. At the controls of the first flight:…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Independent Travel…