Whose tickets are in a flight they have not chosen, and may have been picked out by someone with the addition skills of an addled earthworm (three people flying from Barcelona, final destination Calais: one BCN-BRU, one BCN-CDG, one BCN-LGG, three rental cars, three people scratching their heads in confusion).
Nobody cares about you. They care about the average behavior of one million passengers.
This. Especially this. The vast majority of people in a first or business class section of most flights have not paid for their tickets, they are travelling on business and it is their company which has selected the airline and ticket. Many of them travel cattle class when going on their own. The advertisements are not aimed at you or indeed most individuals, they are aimed at the HR departments of major companies.
Some companies have rules about having too many critical employees on the same flight. (For example, there were a couple of very sad, unfortunate incidents in which an entire college or professional sports team died in the same plane crash.)
It makes people feel good about flying with them.
Also, people pay easier €500, for the same flight that Ryan offers for €150.
Why? Because they can say, they used KLM, Etihad etc…rather than a budget airline – ensures them that they are better, richer and more important people.
This is patent nonsense. Budget airlines, in general: have less frequent flights; sometimes use different airports that may be less convenient; and sometimes do not have frequent flier programs that offer substantial benefits to some travelers. For people who can afford the difference in cost between budget and major airlines, flying at the time you want from a convenient airport and gathering reward miles are of greater value than the increased fare. Sorry, it isn’t an issue of the rich thinking everyone else is unwashed and untouchable.
I was referring to people – NOT rich people – the general public.
You are also saying “sometime” several times, for what I described as the SAME FLIGHT, which means same airport and similar times.
This nuttiness of picking a more privileged airline goes sometimes so far, that some people even pick a less convenient travel route, just to avoid a budget airline. It makes them feel better about themselves, that’s how advertising works.
This has nothing to do with rich and poor.
I have literally never met these people that you speak of. While some people dislike specific airlines, it’s not a budget vs full service airline thing. It’s a “I hate Southwest because they left me stranded in Toledo” thing.
Do you have a cite for people avoiding budget airlines so they can boost their self esteem? Because I’m a frequent traveler, I work with many frequent travelers, I’m friends with plenty of people who travel a lot, and I have never once found even a slight hint of anyone making decisions based on what you say here.
Maybe in Europe, but here it’s far more often a combination of 4 things. First, the schedule and location of the flights is important- if I was a business traveler going to the northern part of Houston, it’s entirely possible that AA or United would have a better timed flight going into IAH from DFW, instead of flying DAL-HOU and then having to drive north an hour from Hobby Airport on the south side of Houston.
Second, if you’re a frequent business traveler, like say, a salesman or consultant, it pays to stick with one or two airlines to maximize the frequent flyer benefits. At my old job, we used SWA and AA almost exclusively because they had wide geographic coverage and good frequent flyer programs.
For cost-conscious leisure travelers, it’s also true that the budget carriers aren’t always the cheapest- it’s not uncommon for AA to undercut the SWA fares out of Love Field to places like Houston, Austin or Kansas City.
Finally, not every airport services every location- if you want to fly into Corpus Christi, there are 3 airlines that service that airport (AA, United and SWA) and they only fly short hops to Dallas or Houston from there. So if you’re going from Corpus to say… Nashville, you’re probably best off choosing an airline that can connect you that entire way in an efficient manner, which may not be SWA.
IIRC Southwest gets around the “Sort by lowest price” black hole by simply not putting their flights on general travel websites. $209 + 2 free bags, vs. $189 + $80 for 2 bags, is easier for the mind to parse when they’re on two separate pages. If Joe Average just sees $189 right above $209 on a column of prices the reflexive reaction is to pick $189 regardless of the strings attached.
Well, I have… it’s not a great loss never having meet them, though.
It’s the word budget, some people are allergic to that
Only thing I can provide you with is cites on people hating budget airlines. My opinion is based on what people say about traveling and the look you get when you tell them, that I went their via Ryanair or even considering traveling with them.
This might be a European thing to say or do, but that’s how it is here. Frequent flyer miles are not such a common thing here either; it seems to be more an American thing. It exists, but nobody that I know of makes a travel decision based on frequent flyer miles here.
The main low budget airline here in Europe is Ryanair, sure there are others like Easyjet, AirBerlin etc…
SWA hasn’t made it here yet 
Well, I believe that Ryanair was explicitly modeled on SWA, so Southwest has sort of come to Europe. (Although from what I’ve heard, Ryanair is even more aggressive than Southwest about lowering costs and exploiting sources of revenue.)
I know sometimes people will pick the more expensive route, or the out-of-the-way route, to pick up frequent flyer miles, if they are loyal to one airline. But not “to feel better about themselves.”
Ryanair is famous for putting a charge on everything… they are not far away from paying to use the toilet.
I’ve never flown Ryanair, but from what I’ve heard, they have fees on everything, including online check-in. So I can well understand that some people would prefer not to be nickeled and dimed and instead fly a different carrier.
If you can’t provide a cite, we have moved out of the factual realm of answering questions.
To the contrary, the reasons why people choose to buy tickets on particular airlines, and how loyal they are to airlines, is continually researched to death. Example. There’s no evidence of people choosing airlines based on self-esteem. You can even go to forums like Flyertalk where people endlessly nitpick the pros and cons of every airline, and I will bet you won’t find anyone saying that they are loyal to an airlines because of how it makes them feel about themselves.
The reason people grimace when you talk about Ryanair is because they are frequently mentioned as one of the least-liked airlines in the world: one, two, three, four. You’d probably get the same reaction if you said you took your spouse out to a dinner at a reviled restaurant.
Eight of the ten European airlines with the most passengers have frequent flier programs. The exceptions are Ryanair and Easyjet. So out of the half a billion passengers carried by those ten airlines in 2012, almost 400 million of them flew on airlines with FF programs. I’d say that is common.
Go to the Flyertalk forums and you’ll see a LOT of Europeans who collect frequent flyer miles, and make travel decisions based on them. But those people are (for the most part) really frequent flyers for whom collecting the miles pays off big. Typically they fly 50,000 or more miles a year.
Plus they have porn star flight attendants!