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Old Feb 9, 2019, 8:46 am
  #245  
yurtripper
 
Join Date: Dec 2016
Location: WAW
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Originally Posted by hugolover
I am not convinced that LOT have ever seriously hunted such low cost traffic (in PL terms). LOT fly E75s as far as Larnaca!

In other words, LOT have never really chased such pax, they tried a little after EU accession but the money just was never there.

They’re far too expensive for the majority of UA and PL diaspora. It can’t be overstated how price sensitive this group is. (my emphasis)
Thank you for saying this. I said the same thing once in another thread and got my head bitten off for it.

I meet and know lots of people here whose income is far in excess of mine, people who are very high up the pecking order in banks and other private sector companies, and I feel like a lavish spendthrift in comparison to these guys just because I almost never fly the ULCCs. When a bank president virtually snorts out his coffee because you propose flying a full service carrier rather than Ryanair/Wizz for his skiing trip or his jaunt to Andalusia, or mention considering LO PE for a TATL rather than basic Y, it feels surreal. If I met people in equivalent positions in Russia (and I have) they'd laugh at me for suggesting anything other than J/F, thinking I was some guy who probably slept on a park bench.

It's often the same on holiday also. The senior director/exec from PL would go off to Sharm or Hurghada (when these places were still popular) on a full-board hotel with a charter flight, eat and drink only what the hotel provided throughout the stay, and then on the last day take a trip to the local market, where they'd spend an hour or more beating some poor souvenir hawker down to the lowest conceivable price, before heading back to PL having taken virtually no money out of their pocket for the entire stay (one guy even boasted about how he never even took his wallet because all the costs were covered!).

Compare that to the Russians, who would drink the place dry and then some, and spend like it was going out of fashion. One of my best friends (now sadly departed) worked as an Egyptian tour manager. He told me that after the bombing of the Russian flight from Sharm killed tourism, everyone was crying about the loss of revenue from Russians, but when it came to the Poles they hardly cared, since virtually none of their money ever left the hotel they were booked in.

Of course, the kind of people I refer to still drop silly money on conventional status symbols, like cars, but when it comes to air travel I can't overemphasis just how price-sensitive PL and UA seems to be, even for people who earn more in an afternoon than I do in a week. There's nothing wrong with wanting to save money, but I'm still amazed at how price-sensitive even the highest echelon of earners are when it comes to air travel.
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