Hi Arthur,
At 21:01 29/09/01 -0400, you wrote:
>snip, snip....
>
(KH)
>You bet! In England two of our airlines, EasyJet and Ryanair, are offering
>ticket prices of �9-99 and �0.99 respectively (yes -- about US$15.00 and
>US$1.50) for flights to Europe and thus thousands are filling their seats
>in truly elastic fashion.
(AC)
>Keep that up for a while and they will be bankrupt. More than likely not
>covering their marginal or variable costs. Looks good as a promo but bad
>business strategy.
It's certainly promo, but don't worry about these two airlines. They're run
by two of the most brilliant entrepreneurs in England and Ireland. They'll
soon restore economic pricing -- but with tens of thousands of new
customers. Meanwhile, British Airways hasn't moved on prices, has had to
cancel 200 flights a week, and is in a complete daze -- except (of course)
in asking for a governmental bail-out.
(British Airways, although now privatised, is the product of a nationalised
industry [which was then a monopoly]. As such, it is still heavily
over-staffed [in comparison with EasyJet and Rynair by a factor of two to
three]. Its condition is rather like British Telecom, also the product of a
nationalised monopoly, and which is also still heavily overstaffed, and is
technically bankrupt [as BA will be quite soon]. The only thing BT has
managed to do in the last few years is to pull the UK down to
bottom-but-one position in the European league table of broadband Net access.)
Switching threads, thanks to Christoph Reuss' message, we now know why the
New York Trade Center Towers collapsed. They were designed by a public
authority able to over-ride or ignore the sort of normal building
regulations that would be required of a private builder.
Keith
___________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
________________________________________________________________________
