orbitmic

On the first point, precisely, this is not the same process as the living wage. When we discussed the adoption of living wages where I work, we just made the decision to bear this extra cost for social and moral reasons, we did not increase fees by £200 to have someone else pay for it directly.

Of course you could argue it is a moot point as ultimately the company will need to get the money somewhere to be profitable but to me, it is entirely different from earmarked charges which is what I understand (not just from olivedel's description but also from separate discussion) is being considered.

So to me a much better parallel would be those hotels which charge a charity fee of $ x /night for a charity of their choice. When it happens I always ask if the hotel is matching the donation. If yes (it happens) I am happy to pay. If not (which happens more frequently) I refuse it because I consider that it is not the hotel's place to decide how much I should give to which charity. And yes I do take offence in the fact that they then take full credit for contributions which they have not made either fully or partly.

As for the question of market and choice it is in effect an empirical question. It is one thing to differentiate products (eg pay the same for your basic flight "or" more to pollute less as you would in Mexico when choosing between the yellow and green cabs. It would be different to not have any choice on some routes on which a de facto monopoly exists and there are lots of them. I know on which flights I'd bet af will fly those (after the first pr stunt on more prominent routes).

NickB

You read my mind!
To me, it is a difference of form rather than of substance. Whether you do it one way of the other, it is still the same money coming from the same pockets and going to the same ones and those who decide what should be done and still are the same people.

Ultimately, it seems to me that the only difference is the spin that is put on it. If what you find annoying is that spin, then I think that we agree. But, on balance, I think I prefer a positive action spun unpleasantly than no action at all.


I must confess to never having come across any hotel that has a compulsory donation to a charity. If I came across that, I would probably react to it in the same way as I think of "fuel surcharges" by airlines, viz. mildly annoyed at the spin but ultimately treating it as nothing other than part of the price.

If you mean optional donations, then I personally systematically ignore (on the principle similar to yours that, if I am giving to charity, I want to choose my own charities) but I do not think that I find that offensive. This is nudge stuff, isn't it? I can't see anything fundamentally wrong in nudging people towards donating to certain charities; certainly less objectionable than chugging.

What I fail to understand here, however, is that I have not seen any suggestion that they will be a specific surcharge. whether optional or compulsory, for those "lab'line" flights. To me, therefore, it looks pretty much like the living wage initiative, except for the publicity and spinning stuff.

orbitmic

The ones I am mentioning are definitely not mere nudging, because nudging would be merely based on a mixture of alerting and priming (a bit like BA telling you about children in need on every flight) while the ones I have in mind work on "implicit coercion" by making it "opt out". In other words, while not compulsory, they automatically put the charge on your bill and you need to explicitly refuse it if you do not want to donate (more like the so called "optional service charges" in London restaurants I guess). But of course, that part of the comparison would admittedly not be relevant here.

For the rest, indeed, I agree we are probably not that far off and it is indeed largely the PR that annoys me. As for the "related charge" that was what I heard from some AF people, along the same lines that olivedel described (AF can't and won't pay for any of the extra cost so increase the fares for those flights based on the fact that there is a cost involved in doing the right thing and the pax will pay for it). Pragmatically, apart from anything else, I share Goldorak's view that this is at the very least a mistaken calculation.