ABSTRACT
In September 2004 a survey of 19,500 British leisure passengers produced some astonishing results. A much higher proportion of passengers stated that they would definitely recommend low-cost, ‘no-frills’ carriers such as easyJet, bmibaby or Jet2.com to their friends than would recommend British Airways, Alitalia, Air France or most of the other European traditional scheduled airlines. The discrepancy in rankings was particularly marked on short-haul routes. For flights to France, 57 per cent of easyJet’s passengers would definitely recommend this airline, while among British Airways passengers the figure dropped to only 32 per cent, while only 17 per cent of Air France passengers would recommend this airline (Holiday Which 2005). These results were astonishing precisely because lowcost carriers were still a relatively recent phenomenon. While low-cost, no-frills services between Britain and Ireland had been launched in 1991, it was only in the later 1990s that they spread across the Channel to other European markets. Earlier surveys in 1999 and 2002 had produced comparable findings (Holiday Which 1999 and 2003).
