I wonder if budget airlines hate families because children create too much work for airline flight crews onboard their planes.  Perhaps they don’t like cleaning up the sticky messes that seem to follow young children, or the crying that can be heard over the noisy budget aircraft engines, whatever it is the budget airlines seem to be really targeting those with families as a source of additional funds.

Recently I was flying with two budget airlines, Easy Jet and Ryan Air – of the two Easy Jet is usually the nearest to a professional flight crew with their onboard staff friendly, polite and even helpful (not something always to be said about Ryan Air crew) – and with me on the trip were my two young children and partner.  Anyone with any experience of young children knows that it’s impossible to travel light, so the baggage restrictions required additional payment for checked in luggage before we even left home.  Once at the airport we were met with making a decision about whether or not to purchase priority boarding passes which would allow us to board the plane with anyone else who had such a pass rather than wait at the back with those who didn’t.  It’s bad enough that parents have to buy these, but what’s worse is that they even charge you for the children to have them.  Surely it would be more customer friendly to have them provided free of charge for children under 10 if they are accompanied by a priority boarding pass holder.  I guess customer friendly does not translate well in terms of profit. 

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The amount of priority boarders on our flights far outnumbered the travellers who chose to just take their chances once the priority travellers were seated.  This means that if we hadn’t of paid the additional fees, we would have risked being separated throughout the plane journey.  Isn’t it stressful enough for parents flying with young children without adding separation anxiety to the equation?

Apart from paying for the children, who couldn’t be left in the airport alone if we had decided to just pay for adults and not the children (hence the place where they have a stranglehold over the additional costs that families must pay), my main complaint about this new way of creating additional income doesn’t actually benefit all the travellers.  Getting through a packed departure lounge with young children is quite a feat of physical and mental agility, so the chances of being near the front of the boarding line were minimal.  Because the children are young and needed assistance on steep airport stairs out to the aircraft, not to mention the distance we had to walk to the plane and helping the children board the plane, there were a number of people who were not priority boarders who just rushed past ourselves and other parents who also had small children or babies.  If the airlines must screw as much money out of easy targets like parents, why can’t they at least have the decency to give those parents time to board their children safely before allowing non-priority boarding passengers through to the aircraft? 

I love to travel and believe it’s one of the best forms of education that I can give my children, but if the budget airlines are going to continue to penalize families, it’s going to be cheaper to travel by regular airlines because their cheaper children’s fares, more generous luggage allowance, plus small children being automatically priority boarders will make it a better choice both in terms of finance, and stress.