Do you remember when short haul airlines served you real food on china plates? Back then the cutlery was stainless steel and the wine came in glasses that were not made of plastic. In those heydays of flying, passengers were greeted with hot towels, given printed menus and generally made to feel as if they were a customer.
The likes of RuinAir and SleazyJet put an end to all that with their push shove culture where the passenger was treated more like cattle than a pampered person.
True the airfares now are a fraction of what they were way back when BOAC and BEA flew the skies but here is an astounding fact. For very much the same sort of money that you would have paid to fly to Tenerife in the Canary Islands back in the 1970’s you can still do so now and at the same time enjoy all the old fashioned creature comforts of flying as you used to do.
How do we know? The answer is we have just flown from London Gatwick to Tenerife with British Airways in their Club Europe class. We could eat the food, the pleasantly mannered stewardess served us with panache and a smile rather than throwing a dead sandwich to us across the middle seat while demanding we pay £3:50 and the whole experience was a most enjoyable way of moving South some 1,800 miles in four and half hours.
The middle seat on the Airbus A320 we flew in was blanked off and the pitch of the seats some 2 inches more than the seats in economy class. Having spent those few hours sitting in the seat I can assure you that extra inches really do matter