Originally Posted by simonsmith
Sjoerd, I am sorry to see you so upset.
I think it was your initial tone that may have upset some people, your rather direct and perhaps a little undermining aproach towards my own comments did make my hackles rise a little as you can see from my own earlier reply. There are cultural differences which may make a comment seem perfectly reasonable in one place but not another. Perhaps if we were all a little gentler and more supportive in our comments it might help. I am sorry to see that you think the typical Englishman is arrogant; I can assure you that there are good and bad ones just as there are all over the world! Some of my own closest friends are Dutch as well as from the UK. The fact that we are all different makes life interesting!
Best wishes and hope your day gets better.
Simon, I am not upset and my day has been excellent so far. Spring has arrived in Amsterdam and for the first time this year we had lunch outside in the sun.
Of course you are right that there are nice and not-so-nice people everywhere; it just seems that a lot of the not-so-nice ones are here on Flyertalk's KLM forum.
I have done my best to explain KLM's strategy which is to get relatively more revenue from home market flyers (please remember that KL's "home market" recently increased by some 350%), at the expense of flyers from other markets. I NEVER ever suggested that KLM doesn't need any UK-based customers, they are and as far as I know will remain an important market for KLM. However, I do believe that the UK market is becoming relatively less important for KL. Some of the frequent complainers here don't seem to be able to understand that simple logic.
I don't believe that the typical Englishman is arrogant and I apologize in case I misformulated in an earlier post. It's just a certain sub-class of English people, well-represented here on Flyertalk, that are typically arrogant.
Have a good Easter weekend.