Taken for a ride by the Fat-Cat Controller
MISERY for lunch on Tuesday but it was nothing to do with Tory austerity (Nicola’s Nats and Tricky Dickie Leonard’s Marxists really think Thatcher’s still in No 10, don’t they?)
It was mizeria, a Polish side-dish of cucumber and sour cream made to a recipe from a Ryanair flight attendant.
Ryanair staff get a miserable reputation for poor customer service, largely from snobs who pine for fares as high as a Boeing 737 to deter the hoi polloi.
By contrast – and I flew Ryanair between Prestwick and Dublin twiceweekly for years – I found them charming if you made conversation, listened during the safety brief and heeded the airline’s rules. One piece of hand luggage meant, funnily enough, one piece.
The airline’s boss, Michael O’Leary, is a lightning rod for passenger ire because he acts the galoot, claiming passengers would ‘crawl over broken glass’ for cheap fares and threatening a £1 fee for toilets.
And it is just an act. Sweary O’Leary attended Ireland’s grandest private school and is a business whizz. The airline (it started with a propeller-driven thing fresh from a bomb-run over Hitler’s Ruhr) is now Europe’s second biggest carrier because it gets the basics – safety, reliability, cost – right.
They used to play a trumpet blast when they landed on time. Annoying? Not half as annoying as the honeyed tones of a flag-carrier airline apologising for ‘the late arrival of this flight and the obvious inconvenience…’
Ryanair fares were so cheap, my hop over the North Channel cost less than a taxi from Dublin Airport to the banks of the Liffey. Contrast O’Leary’s success with Alex Hynes, managing director of ScotRail, who declared ‘customers don’t care how old their trains are’ as his firm deploys 40-year-old carriages. I am one of ScotRail’s target customers, with a station a two-minute stroll from home and another the same distance from work. Yet I avoid trains, taking my chances at the sclerotic western end of the M8 (I guess all the cones are for a Moscow-style ‘Zil lane’ for exclusive use of politicians’ limos).
Mr Hynes’s trains are expensive and, in my personal experience, woefully unreliable (spare me excuses about Network Rail being to blame – a delay is a pain no matter who’s responsible).
My line is plagued with the squalid Class 314, built in 1979. ScotRail trills that it is replacing them this year. ‘The train now being withdrawn is 25 years too late...’
SCOTRAIL’s Mr Hynes pockets £255,000 and he might, with bonuses, tip £380,000. It’s not a bonus he should be getting, but his jotters. No surprise his complacent comments came at the SNP conference where he was currying favour as the Nationalists mull a state-run operator (I’ve two words for those who think that’s a good idea: British Rail).
If we had a Transport Secretary worth the name, it would have been a Ratner moment when the boss suffers after confirming they’re taking the public for fools. Instead we have no-mark Michael Matheson (salary £108,854) whose career should have gone into the sidings after a shambolic spell at Justice.
I’m not looking for recipe tips from ScotRail staff, just reliability, cheaper fares and trains where you want to wipe your shoes when you get on, not when you get off.