Oh, say can you see by DM’s early light…

Budget Smudget

I’m a big believer in customer service excellence, but Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O'Leary’s recent announcement that he’s serious about making passengers pay for the right to relieve themselves on flights by installing credit card-operated loos really takes the cake.

Or should that read ‘toilet roll’? 

O’Leary’s both king of the in-flight surcharge and full of bombast, in my opinion. Maybe he’s just taking the piss (or set to charge for it, at least), but Ryanair is apparently intent on making its passengers suffer wherever possible – particularly when it comes to their hip pockets.

There’s no debating that Ryanair offers incredibly low internet fares (£0.99 to Cork, anyone?). But by the time you’ve paid add-on costs for taxes and fees, airport check-in, baggage, priority boarding passes and credit card surcharges, you might as well fly a non-discount airline.

Hell, even B.A. starts to look attractive.

To my way of thinking, Ryanair’s propensity for treating customers like cattle and working down to a price rather than up to a standard is the antithesis of service excellence. Maximising profit is one thing, but let’s all try to look beyond the current quarter’s P&L if we truly want to retain customers and grow our businesses, shall we?

Needless to say, I for one won’t be flying Ryanair any time soon.

Blacklists and Perfect Storms

Well, a pox on The Consulting Association, a Droitwich-based firm currently being prosecuted for a ‘serious breach’ of the Data Protection Act for secretly on-selling personal information to around 40 construction companies (among them Taylor Woodrow, Laing O’Rourke and Balfour Beatty), so that said firms could allegedly weed out potential trouble-makers from amongst job applicants.

I’m hardly a card-carrying unionist, but the whole notion of collecting and selling non-consented personal information really must be deplored. As reported by the BBC, The Information Commissioner’s Office believes that some 3,213 workers had details of their personal relationships, trade union activity and employment history traded by The Consulting Association for as low as £2.20 a pop.

I don’t know what’s more offensive from a data protection perspective: The fact that The Consulting Association’s ‘blacklist’ ran for over fifteen years or that the cost of violating workers’ privacy was deemed to be roughly equivalent to the price of eight cans of baked beans.

On another data front, I see Security Minister, Lord West, has announced that there’s no decision yet on the Government’s proposed giant database of phone calls, e-mails and internet use. Richard Thomas is calling for ‘a full democratic debate about where exactly the [data collecting] lines should be drawn’, so it will be interesting to see what happens over coming weeks. Because if you put Jack Straw’s controversial Clause 152 of his Coroners and Justice Bill alongside the Communications Data Bill, a near perfect data protection storm is certainly brewing over Westminster way – one which could impact on all our personal lives.

Goodbye Data Protection, Hello Data-Sharing Debacle