What flying to Monaco on a budget airline taught me

The Outsiders: Up next in his series, Dan Antopolski documents his recent experience on a low budget flight, and weighs up the pros and cons of travelling for less

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

I just spent a weekend in Monaco and I flew there on easyJet. Who am I? I wonder myself.

I mean – there’s flying on easyJet and then there’s flying on easyJet. Low cost air travel achieves its low cost by trimming all the frills from the doily, then adding them back as options. Within the world of the flight, it has slashed the public sector and privatised those services for sale. At its inception, easyJet was a great leveller. Following several years of itemisation-creep, it now offers us many sweet opportunities to be raised above our fellows with little comforts that make the experience more bearable. My good woman knows the value of choosing seats at the front and all that, so we tend to select those options, which I tell her I think is gullible but which I covertly appreciate.

We go to the gate, arriving in plenty of time for the flight. This sits ill with me, clashing with my persistent admiration for arriving as swashbucklingly close to boarding refusal as can be managed. I don’t know why I still get my jollies from this needless anxiety – anything to distract from the memories of my wartime experiences and the film The Holiday starring Jude Law.

There are vacant seats in the waiting area and we arrange ourselves and our crap, signalling a gauche eagerness to experience air travel. Nevertheless, we are comfy sitting down, more so when more people arrive and have to stand. This is becoming really nice now that our seats are coveted by wistful families, the fathers staring into the distance, the mothers glaring at the fathers whom they loathe but to whom life has manacled them. Their children are young and for them the word holiday is entirely a misnomer for the relocated drudgery of the coming week.

They have not bought speedy boarding either. We have though – and when the announcement is made for our favoured group to advance, we rise from our thrones with eyes modestly downcast and we sashay to the boarding pass checkpoint, past the licked lips of the fathers, the randomising anger of the mothers and the open admiration of the children. The flight happens to be delayed so we wait on the far side of the checkpoint – our VIP status now geographically explicit, guarded by a liveried footman.

The poor saps have seats, toilets and vending machines but do they have prestige? They do not

One day all passengers will have paid for speedy boarding and the advantage will be eliminated. After an interim of baffled dismay this will be rumbled and the airlines will have to introduce another premise for monetised hierarchy. I imagine they have strategy meetings about this years in advance, like planning for the death of a monarch or deliberately underclocking smartphone CPUs to stagger our upgrades at a commercially beneficial tempo.

For now though, we in the royal enclosure are far above the common man. We pat our cabin baggage, another badge of advantage, designed and marketed to the savvy traveller as having the maximum permissible dimensions for onboard carriage. Not for us the ennui of baggage reclaim. Again, at some point the public will all have cottoned on and there will be no room on the plane for all the suitcases, necessitating additional commercial calibration.

Thanks to the delay, we stand in our new chairless zone for a further half hour, casting pitying glances at our former peers, who have now occupied our vacated seats. The poor saps have seats, toilets and vending machines but do they have prestige? They do not. They must now regret the penny-pinching and self-denying thoughts that guided their booking session. And the most glittering prizes are still to come! Who will board the plane speedily and have the pick of the overhead storage spaces? Us! Well okay not us, because first we are boarding a bus to drive us 20 pointless yards across the tarmac to the waiting aeroplane, a distance we cannot be trusted to walk without being sucked into an engine and minced.

Speedily indeed our Alpha group boards the bus, which being a select few we only half-fill, and then we wait, standing again, for the betas to vacate our old seats in the lounge and get processed by the footman. Is it any wonder that an elitist glowering greets the second wave of bussengers? The right to glower is all that remains of the aura of 1960’s Pan Am glamour we thought we had purchased from 2019 easyJet for an extra tenner.

Anyway, being last aboard the bus, the shambling morlocks without speedy boarding stand nearest the doors and will disembark the bus first, board the plane first and have first pick of the overhead storage, making a mockery of the whole speedy boarding concept, and hence the very spirit of entrepreneurial capitalism! It is a farce and an outrage! An outrage! Still – if we cannot show the additional privilege that our notional hard work and talent have earned us, we can still tell people about it I suppose. Fly safe.