It's official. It's August so corporate business is in low gear but holiday season is in high. If we too turn to the leisure sector, we see that Ryanair's recent experience with the introduction of some new ancillary charges might have some salient lessons for us all.
Ryanair is introducing some more ancillary fees. No surprise there. Ancillary fees appear to be providing the extra revenue that carriers seem to desperately need in the face of rising operating costs and customers' seemingly insatiable hunger for lower top-line fares.
As last year's CarTrawler Yearbook of Ancillary Revenues amply demonstrated, the fees that loyalty programmes generate for airlines is massive. In the case of legacy carriers such as British Airways and Delta they represent more than 50% of ancillary revenues and they are growing.
Ryanair has no co-branded loyalty card, however, and so has no source of revenue comparable to the British Airways American Express card.
But those carriers who entered the market with new business models still face some of the same costs and challenges as their traditional competitors.
Ryanair, therefore, has announced that from November it is changing its cabin bag policy. Passengers could previously bring two cabin bags free of charge - a wheelie bag which was tagged at the gate and placed in the hold and a small bag to go under the seat in front. This will continue to be offered to priority passengers but non-priority passengers must now pay anything up to £25 (when paying at the gate) to take the bag on board.
This can be seen simply as another way of getting more money or, with given that there is such a large gap between the charges, a way of incentivising travellers to pack lighter (and therefore save fuel costs).
Ryanair's defence, however, is that it is trying to disincentivise passengers from using the overhead containers because it increases aircraft turnaround time which can add hugely to costs.
Low-cost carriers need to sweat the maximum out of their assets so minimising the time it takes to get off on and off a plane is a critical tactic in maintaining revenue in the face of rising costs.
Traditional carriers are known to be building extra tarmac time into their schedules as a way of maximising on-time performance stats and minimising flight delay compensation.
However, reducing the time it takes to unload and reload a plane is not just in the airline's interest. It's in passengers' interest as well, especially business passengers for whom time is literally money.
Avoiding the wait for baggage to arrive on a carousel is why so many business travellers never check their bag.
Is the time coming when airlines turn the tables and give leisure travellers a free check-in allowance and instead surcharge those with cabin baggage? The airlines would retain fee revenue but business travellers would have what matters most to them, namely time.
Could overhead storage space soon become a factor in buyer-supplier negotiations?