Mary Portas on Easyjet's Inflight Shopping

Portas, M (2010) Shop! Mary Portas turns her nose up at easyjet's inflight shopping experience Daily Telegraph magazine 4th September, 2010 p.13

Ever since I've been following this excellent column I have been waiting for Mary Portas to get around to a review of easyJet ( don't tell me that you didn't recognise the logo ! )

Her verdict in brief 6/10 - good customer service, terrible food and overpriced inflight catering.

There is also a paragraph in Mary's article about easyJet's website ( and I'm sure most people will have used that ). The 'Help' function bumps you into a frequently irrelevant page of FAQ's. Better than the telephone support, which Mary claims is "hopeless, just hopeless"

I am quoting all the above from my printed copy of saturday's paper. The Telegraph website of this column

www.telegraph.co.uk/maryportas

has not been updated since the end of July.

Neither can I find this article on the Newsbank database, which includes the content of the paper, but not the glossy magazine maybe ?

Maybe there are some advantages to the old-fashioned print sources after all !

Business Review

Another excellent source of UK case studies is this quarterly journal. Each 40 page issue is packed with them. The April 2010 issue looks at what has worked, and what has failed for Stelios Haji-Ioannou (Head of easyGroup) Although the journal is really aimed at A Level students you can always follow up your research on other databases such as Key Note and Business Source Premier.

In the meantime here are some 'easy' principles , and what they mean when you climb aboard your flight....

Price Elastic ( fall in price leads to high demand )

No frills ( High fixed costs but these reduced by no meals on the plane, quick turnaround on the runway )

Yield Management System Price changes according to demand. Book your plane early before the price goes up too much !

High Asset Utilisation Large % of seats will be taken on your flight.

Outsourcing to the customer ( Let them print out their own boarding card ).

Mike Sturrock ( Head of Operating Systems at easyJet ) has done some guest lectures at the University recently. These might be worth looking out for in the future.