Originally Posted by
fassy
Well, I know more than enough colleagues and friends which have been burned by booking FR to some place, just to end up at a secondary airport hundreds of km away from their destination.... those NEVER booked FR again. Even in situations where it would made sense. And then I have a couple of colleges which buy the cheapest ticket. Always. FR? Sure! WizzAir... of course... some shady tour operator chartering a flight from CPH to Morocco on a tiny Greek airline having just two 50+ years old birds? If it is cheap... yeah, definitely.
While I am totally on the other side. I only book major carriers. And happily pay for it. Even if service on some of them degrade to FR levels. As I just value the route network and handling in irrops, e.g. at the time Norwegian started their long-haul flights to the US and the 787 going tech all the time, we had a meeting on the east coast. I booked LH, a couple of colleagues DY and tried to shame me how ridiculous expensive my flight was compared to theirs. Well, I was back in EU the week after while they were still looking for a way to get home. As we had several important meetings, some of them had to book one-way flights on LH/UA. They learned the lesson.
I am also avoiding LCCs, and it is not really for the onboard service in Y on European flights. But yes the bigger picture.
I have yet to try Ryanair. I did try Easyjet once Copenhagen to Berlin and back as SK had gutted the schedule, the following week I flew Lufthansa via Frankfurt one way and Munich the other. I have not flown Norwegian since 2009, though I have to say back then they ran a pretty tight ship on the Scandinavian capital city triangle.
In the longer or shorter term this strike has not moved my overall willingness to book SK. I have bookings with them coming up, and see no reason to change those. While not all rebookings have been handled well, and some people did get stuck, I do get an impression that a lot of SK staff did a lot of hard work to make things happen. I knew the HR head of an AF/KLM region during the last big AF pilot strike. They went through hell to try to manage the rebookings, but the system is just not geared for the load of calls.