Depending on your perspective, there’s a change brewing in the bowels of the airline industry that’s either the best, most brilliant business change of all time, or complete cocky-doodie. European short-haul carrier RyanAir, already notorious for making pretty near everything a paid extra in their flights between European cities, wants you to pay to use the bathroom.
Yes, you read that right. Always seeking new ways to make money, RyanAir, the airline that has been known to price the occasional seat at just one euro and make money instead on extras, has decided that using a bathroom needn’t be free.
Before you get your panties in a twist, let’s go over a few details.
- First, the idea is only to be put in place for flights lasting under an hour. Given that you need to be strapped into your seat for the first and last 10-15 minutes of every flight anyway there’s really not much of a window to cover.
- Second, RyanAir’s CEO has promised to donate the fees his company collects for bathroom use to charity. Not some of the bathroom use fees; all of them.
- Third, he has two really good reasons to want to do this: the plan is to convert the planes to have more seats in them when a few of the bathrooms can be eliminated based on less demand, and by keeping people in their seats and creating a more orderly overall environment the bathroom fees become a genuine productivity and time savings mechanism. In the airline business, that translates to big money.
I think this is brilliant. Human-compassion uproar notwithstanding it’s what’s business change is all about.
As stinky as this particular business change may sound to you, let’s be frank about what business change is: you’re looking for ways to make things better (whatever that means on any given day).
And I’m not sure charging bathroom fees on short-haul flights makes things worse.
The fly in this stinky ointment? Even though RyanAir doesn’t operate in the United States, they’ll need US approval to reconfigure the seats in their planes because their fleet is made by the American company Boeing.
Strange but true. But often, that’s exactly how business change works. Now if only RyanAir could figure out what you were doing in the bathroom and how to charge you extra if you . . . well, you get it . . .
