If you value your time, you’re already being heavily taxed on short flights.

“Although, one would have to wonder about the business-savy of Business travelers who don’t buy round-trip tickets and throw away the unwanted portion, if the one-way ticket IS twice the cost of the round-trip ticket.”

I seem to recall that, in the US, the fine print on the ticket bans that, and that some airlines were checking on that with their computer systems. The end result was that the business traveler might find that the second round-trip ticket wouldn’t be honored.

“I suppose I might have to concede that at least sometimes low budget airlines aren’t a scam. I used to fly Southwest in the States quite a lot, although it actually went places people might want to go.”

It’s actually part of Southwest’s secret. They fly where you want to go…directly. By ditching hub&spoke and only doing direct flights to and from locations with adequate demand, they manage to lop a great deal of complexity and cost off of the traditional model.

And I’d have to agree with you generally on the undesirability of subsidies (practically a first, that), though I have to wonder about the implicit subsidy available to flag carriers via their hammer-lock on slots at major airports.

?Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.? - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Michael O’Leary has used the kinds of argument you outline above, see for example todays coverage in teh Financial Times. Unfortunately people don’t take as much notice of obscure competition tribunals as they do of the use of four letter words. It would be wrong to mistake what gets reported for being Ryanair’s whole case. In this and the case in France I believe there were no payments to Ryanair, just a dispute about airline pricing, so no-one is paying Ryanair to fly people places.

It just is not obvious that the arrangements made actually are subsidies in the sense that you make out. If they are not, and the fact that commercially run airports have made equivalent arrangements suggests they are not, then all that is happening is that someone is fixing prices outside market conditions. With a the same sort of hype that makes out that Ryanair’s arrangements are subsidies that is communism.

It does look like Ryanair is being judged to be on the wrong end of some pretty arbitrary rules in a way that only benefits expensive and inflexible airlines. O’Leary has made a fairly outrageous statement to draw attention to that. It is, however, less important that this claim might be hype than that he might have a point. I think the personal abuse is more or less as overdone as the claims of communism.

In the Charleroi case it will not necessarily prevent Ryanair flying although it will change the costs but in the similar French case they might actually be prevented from flying by an airline that had an arrangement with neighbouring airport.

A One-way ticket is more likely to be bought by a business traveler. Round-trip tickets are more likely bought by tourists, most of whose budgets are more limited.

Although, one would have to wonder about the business-savy of Business travelers who don’t buy round-trip tickets and throw away the unwanted portion, if the one-way ticket IS twice the cost of the round-trip ticket.

Meanwhile, in the UK railways work like airlines - the cheapest “single” available on the day of travel is a return, and there are some impressively baroque complications on times and days of travel.

First, no, no one is forcing the Charleroi airport authority to offer Ryanair a subsidy. However, if the Belgian federal government were to offer a subsidy to SN Brussels, no one would be forcing them to do it either, and yet it would still be an illegal subsidy under EU law and would have the same effect on competition. Either the airports have to be private - which is simply not realistic in any very crowded country - or the courts and the government have to place some limits on how government subsidises airport use.

Second, were O’Leary a less… colourful businessman, he would have deployed arguments like claiming that flag carriers benefit from a variety of hidden subsidies; he would say that the Walloon region has high unemployment and needs the business activity; or he might have said that his subsidised airfares have additional social benefits by enhancing mobility within the EU. Had he made those arguments, I still would have said that he was a hypocritical anti-labour robber-baron snake oil salesman trying to pass himself off as an innovative anti-establishmentarian entrepreneur, but I doubt his remarks would have been interesting enough to blog.

The EU is not preventing passengers from choosing. It is not preventing Ryanair from flying. It has not shut Ryanair down, nor stopped it from operating in Charleroi. Passengers remain free to choose Ryanair. However, it comes as a surprise to me to learn that it is communist to think that consumers’ choices should be paid for by consumers when they buy tickets. I can understand a socialist public transit advocate like me demanding that my right to choose to take the train requires a public subsidy. But for Michael O’Leary to preach anti-goverment and anti-regulatory free market doctrines and then complain when the government says it shouldn’t subsidise him is awfully rich.

I believe that the subsidy issue is not all that cut and dried. Firstly nobody is forcing the airports to offer generous terms to budget airlines or Ryaniair rather than any of quite a large number of other airlines.

The complaints seem to be prompted by airlines that have secured near monopolies at major airports or even simlar deals at equally small rivals. That is to say, nobody is complaining about the money being spent on , or rather not being charged, to Ryanair, only about the competition that Ryanair is providing. To defend Michael O’Leary’s argument it certainly looks like the historically massively cossetted “flag carrier” airline industry is the prime beneficiary from these decisions. The local governments running the airports are upset, Ryanair is upset, many potential passengers are upset (although the few that might have been scammed might be relieved), cui bono?

Passengers are not bein allowed to choose, local governments are not being allowed to encourage travel to their regions, all to support an expensive and inefficient establishment. Clearly that happens under all sorts of regimes but it is clearly what is now associated with Communism.

The budget airlines already have to put up with a tax regime that is frequently more than 100 per cent on their flights.

Aside from this Ryanair and the like have certainly done a lot to bring Britain closer to Europe and to make direct connections between places that were never connected before. It is great to be able to get to places like Trier or Metz or Graz directly and at a reasonable price. If I want food on the flight I can pick it up at the Pret a Manger at the airport. I know that the authorities in Bosnia are desperate for Ryanair to start flights from the UK to places in Croatia and to Mostar.

Finally, air travel does have unfair advantages over more capital intensive forms of transport but the first thing that needs to be fixed is the lack of tax on aviation fuel. I can understand the reasoning but it is a gross distortion.