27/05/2022
After a recent flight cancelation, and yet another flight-time change for an upcoming flight in less than two weeks time, my verdict is out:
Easyjet will cease to exist in the mid-term - especially if it continues with its policy of canceling and rescheduling flights with short-to-no-notice.
Common sense would lead me to highly dissuade anyone from prebooking an Easyjet ticket for ANY of their flights departing beyond a week's time.
For the most part, I've rarely been wrong with any of my airline-failure-predictions - particularly that of the demise of Eastern Airlines, Sabena and Swissair.
Eastern Airline's early 1980s disdain for implementing any kind of canceled-flight customer-service management system certainly sealed its fate in my eyes. Swissair - not to be confused with its successor, Swiss [International Airlines] - was the mother company of Sabena. Despite its own amazing canceled-flight customer-service, Swissair's sanctioning of Sabena's codeshare partnership with no-frills Virgin said it all, 1½ years before the Swissair Group's collapse.
One way to judge an airline's quality is through its cancellation and rebooking customer-service-quality. Swissair [the airline] certainly led the pack in impecable cancelled-flight-crisis-management. However, Swissair Group sealed its own fate with its truly mind-baffling bad buy-out-spree of the late 90s.
Pity, as I was such a huge fan of its Crossair subsidiary.
Easyjet's rescheduling and cancellation policy will most likely be the cause of its relegation to the same airline cemetery as many-a-carrier, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
Easyjet's management of the recent cancelation was all but helpful. Aside from refusing to rebook me onto another flight, the airline's ground staff also failed to inform me about my EU-regulated passenger rights.
The recent cancelation of a Rome-Berlin run, the rescheduling of a flight I will be taking in two weeks time and my approximately 20 cancelled flights that were preceeeded by the approximately 40 failed flight reschedulings during the pandemic leads me to this conclusion.
Easyjet's disastrous scheduling policy during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic - not to mention its introduction of a Ryanair-style baggage policy in the same period - certainly guaranteed itself a good supply of nails for its own coffin.
The falllout from the pandemic is now all but coming to an end, yet Easyjet's cancellation and rescheduling ordeals persist. Not a good way for a struggling airline to win over customer confidence.
Despite Ryanair's cattle-car slaughterhaus policy, it's been by far more reliable in its scheduling politics.
I've actually seen improvement in Ryanair's ground staff flexibility - for example in letting slightly overweight baggage get on-board without an excess fee.
I know: hard to believe!
Easyjet, on the other hand, refused to significantly reduce its schedule or change its pricing policy throughout the pandemic.
Ryanair was successful at reducing its schedule. Flights weren't canceled once their pandemic schedule had been implemented.
The right thing for Easyjet to have done would have been to raise prices significantly as a means to win over business traveler confidence because it would have guaranteed sufficient take-off revenue and, with it, guaranteed takeoff times and days - regardless how empty a flight might have been.
Instead, Easyjet kept prices rock bottom - yet delusionally behaving as if tourists were going to line up to fly at the height of the pandemic. The airline's management installled a policy of constantly changing flight times and dates - only to cancel them anyway and with extremely short notice.
For a travel business to survive, confidence building measures must be at the center of customer-service-policy. Easyjet fails miserably in this. Ryanair's scheduling policy - as hard as it is for me to admit - kept me from going insane.
Now, Easyjet's takeover by a ["former"] Ryanair executive makes its pending demise - exactly like AirBerlin's government sanctioned management-takeover by a ["former"] Lufthansa executive - a no-brainer.
It is clear that Ryanair is passionately aiming for Easyjet's demise - just as much as Lufthansa aimed to eliminate AirBerlin from the market.
A Trojan Horse story all over again.
If its cancellation and rescheduling policy were not the issue, then the recent decline of its on-board service quality is. Cabin crew remain polite and friendly. But basic food-service amenities are always missing. It is not possible that basic food and drink is not available.
Ryanair might offer a weak choice of food and drink. But at least they are consistently supplied with those weak choices. I know what I can expect when I fly
Ordering basic food and drink on Easyjet has become a total hit-and-miss.
Easyjet is simply no longer following the how-to-retain-a-customer playbook rules.
In fact, once I will have used up all my current Easyjet tickets, I will think twice before booking an EasyJet ticket.
Unfortunately, Berlin has been a desert landscape as far as earthly non-stop flight choices goes. It now looks as if it's destined to become a lunar one.
