Just how overpriced are budget-airline refreshments?
By J.J.C.
LAST week Kayak, a search engine for travel, caused a minor kerfuffle when it released the results of a survey examining the price of in-flight refreshments offered by budget British airlines. The survey found price hikes that ran to hundreds or even thousands of percent. Perhaps the most staggering mark-up was that of the humble instant-soup sachet: available on a supermarket shelf for about £0.13 ($0.17), on a Flybe flight you'll pay £2.50 ($3.60)—a hike of over 1,800%. Ryanair, often the pantomime budget-airline baddie in these kinds of discussions, was a key offender. They demanded the highest prices for three of the items surveyed; their mark-up on water, for example, was more than 1,300%.
Scandalous mark-ups of in-flight snacks are nothing new—Kayak's findings replicate those of a similar study by TravelSupermarket.com, carried out in 2013. Nor should they be surprising. There are few markets more captured than a small cabin 30,000 feet in the air (though selling hungry, strapped-in travellers snacks and drinks makes more sense than flogging them lottery scratch-cards and other random items, as some budget carriers have begun to do). And many flyers actually want to spend money, either in a rush of excitement at the start of their trip or as an excuse to offload unused foreign currency at the end.
But it's worth looking closely at the numbers. Kayak's study compared some prices to budget bulk-buy packs in supermarkets, so some of their base prices seem excessively cheap (25p for a muffin, for example, is quite a deal). To get supermarket-level prices when travelling, you'd need to lug six litres of water, 18 cans of lager and 80 teabags onto a flight. And—though the levels of service on budget airlines vary widely—the prices of in-flight refreshment should perhaps be compared to somewhere with table service rather than with a supermarket. Sure, a packet of instant coffee isn't the same as a barista-crafted iced decaf skinny caramel macchiato. But customers in a coffee shop aren't allowed to sidestep the price-trap by bringing in their own refreshments, whereas on flights they are. When put into this context, the prices don't seem quite so eye-watering.
What seems more significant is how little prices have moved since the 2013 study. Many have only gone up by a few pence here and there in the interim, and the peak price of tea has actually fallen by a penny. With oil and commodity prices in freefall, it seems that budget airlines don't need to keep hiking up the refreshment prices to preserve their margins. And the scratch-card profits probably help, too.
