Look, what about a compromise in this by a an ULCC thread for all of them together. They are a unique & different breed compared to the other international airlines.. Is this not a reasonable outcome??

Nope. There's no impetus for any to have their own forum. (I think you meant forum, not thread?) There's not even impetus for them to share a forum.

Budget Travel is where they belong. (Unless someone wisely revokes their operating certificates... ;) )

By "doesn't work", I mean this and this: I recommend to someone posting a query on the Budget Travel Board, where that query attracts the grand total of, tada... zero, nada, zilch, niets, nichts, niente, rien de rien in terms of replies whereas it attracts at least a couple of answers (not much but better than nothing) in the original forum in which it was asked (OEFFP).

By "doesn't work", I also mean this and this: I recommend to another poster to post their Easyjet query on the Budget Travel forum because they would get more people familiar with Easyjet there only to see the thread on the Budget Travel forum attracting the absolutely ginormous total of 1 (yes: one, un, ein, uno, een,...) reply and, moreover, a reply from a poster who is regular reader/poster on the original forum on which the Q was first asked (Flying Blue) so with exactly zero added value from posting on Budget Travel. So much for the poster getting many more answer to his query on Budget Travel.

And you know that that makes me feel like as the person who, in both cases, suggested that they should post on Budget Travel? A right clueless pillock. Thankfully, the two posters concerned have seen enough of my posts to know that I normally know what I am talking about. Still, I felt rather embarrassed and you will certainly not catch me at it again. There is absolutely no way that I will again recommend to anybody with a question on either Easyjet or Ryanair to post it in Budget Travel.

And I would suggest that anybody who again persists in recommending that posters should direct these posts there should equally feel embarassed at providing distinctly unhepful advice to fellow FTers since the odds are they are not likely to get better information in that forum than they would do in forums such as OEFFP, UK&I, BAEC or FB fora.


Well, I guess that it depends on what you call small number.

Out of 485 threads across FT with "Ryanair" in the title, 191 were in the Budget Travel forum. Out of 408 threads with "Easyjet" in the title, 130 were in the Travel Budget forum. So, in other words, there were 253% more posts on Ryanair outside the Budget Travel forum than within it and 313% for Easyjet.

Now, if you consider that an error ratio of between 253% or 313% to be a small number, if you consider that there would be no problem if, for instance, that 2 out of every posts on Delta were posted outside the Delta forum, then you can say that it would be preposterous for me to say that "it doesn't work".


If you read what I said earlier, I certainly did not say "I want". I said that there was a problem and just putting one's fingers in one's ear singing "la la la... don't wanna know... that's the way it should be... and anyway I hate Ryanair and Easyjet and therefore they do not deserve their own forum" is not an answer.

As I said earlier, I am not at all clear what the answer to the problem is. But I am very clear that contenting oneself with dismissing the issue out of hand as a non-problem and a kind of "that's the way it is and why don't all those stupid "I want" cry babies not realise that they should post in Budget travel" is not a particularly fruitful way to approach the problem.

Whether we like or not, there are many more posts on either Ryanair or Easyjet that are posted outside the Budget Travel forum than within it and there is no evidence of there being more expertise on either of these airlines on the Budget Travel than on some other fora like BA, FB, OEFFP or UK&I.

Therefore, it seems to me difficult to recommend to individuals that they should post their Easyjet/Ryanair query there rather than elsewhere, and in particular rather than the four above fora which, together with the Budget Travel forum, tend to attract the bulk of discussions on these two airlines.

It does not necessarily follow from this that one should create an LCC forum. I do note, though, that just these two airlines on their own generate somewhere in the region of 1000 threads with their name in the title across FT, which is substantially more than the number of threads in a forum like the Avianca or Aegean ones and broadly in the same order of magnitude as fora like Aer Lingus, Alitalia or Finnair. Again, I do not necessarily regard these as conclusive but it seems that there is a proven level of interest on FT to warrant TB asking itself whether FT is really catering in the best possible way to this established demand from its members and, if not, whether there is a better way to do it.

I am acutely aware that I raise a problem without offering a solution here and it may well be that there is no satisfactory solution. In any event, if there is one, it requires a better brain than mine to find it. But I thought that it would not be appropriate for TB to fool itself into believing that no problem exists when there patently is one.

See the examples above.

I can't speak for the rest of the TalkBoard, but I'm not satisfied with the status quo, either.

Thanks for filling in the details, Nick.

The EasyJet and RyanAir posts, and those for similar airlines, ought to go to one place. For whatever reason Budget Travel is not succeeding in that role. It might be as simple as a title change, but I doubt that members will think of the checking the Travel category when they are looking to post or read Airline information. People naturally look in the Miles and Points category first.

At this moment I believe the best option is to ask our Community Director retitile "Other European Frequent Flyer Programs" to "Other European Airlines, including EasyJet and RyanAir".

The technical deficiency of this change is that these companies do not have FF programs. IMHO what matters is not technical consistency in naming but rather how our members use the forums. MR Deals and Hotel Deals aren't exactly FF program discussion either, but they live under Miles&Points.

In the interest of accurate naming of categories, our Community Director could make changes like these:

"Airline Programs" could become "Airlines and their Programs"

"Miles&Points" could become "Travel Companies and their Miles&Points"

The subheader "These topics are all about frequent flyer programs - and only frequent flyer programs" could become "Discuss your favorite travel providers and their loyalty programs"

I believe that these name changes would not conflict with the missions of any other forums. Other suggestions are welcome here.

Actually, it is not that simple: there are still more Ryanair and Easyjet threads going into Budget Travel than going into OEFFP (191/130 as of lunchtime for FR/U2 in BT and 60/44 in OEFFP). It is just that they tend to split across many fora. That is why I have that kind of not very helpful "I have a problem but no solution" earlier post.

If we were going to attempt to centralise them into OEFFP nonetheless, I think that it would make sense to make it European LCCs rather than just Ryanair and Easyjet (wizzair, etc...). There is very little posted on these as of now but no reason to put them elsewhere than FR and U2 and the phrase "European LCCs" might be clear enough for FR and U2 flyers.

Centralization should be in Budget Travel, in my opinion. Most of these LCC airlines do not have FFP, or have very poor/minimal FFP, e.g. EasyJet.

I fully agree. Just as it took time and action to get posters to use the destinations fora rather than TravelBuzz, it will take time and action to get posters to contribute directly in the Budget travel forum or have their posts moved over there.

I agree that within FT's existing formulated structure BT is more consistent. It's just that our darned members aren't eating the dog food. We need to reformulate the dog food until it matches the tastes of our members. :cool:

That attitude made sense when LCCs could safely be ignored. LCCs are here to stay as a major part of travel for a large portion of the traveling public (and, by extension, people visiting and posting on FT). We need to do a better job addressing them.

It's still budget travel, even if there are more options.

I agree. If there could be links in the list of airlines that ended up in Budget Travel, that would be another possible solution.

I think we need to consider that it may be time for forums to attach themselves to airlines rather than programs.

Especially as existing programs continue their devaluation toward an asymptote of zero value...

It's like I've been recently posting in the Southwest forum: A program can become the best simply by standing in place while all the other programs race to the bottom.

At some point in the devaluation process even FT'ers will lose interest in the programs and start to focus on the value of the product itself. We aren't there yet, but IMHO that's where we're going.

Question: if Southwest (which started the low cost airline business) JetBlue, and others can have their own forum, why not Spirit, Ryan, EasyJet...?

There has been no reasonable answer to this question, rather than "I hate them, or their Flyer Programs suck". Has anyone looked at the Delta Skymiles forum lately?


Putting these airlines in the "budget forum" does not make sense, being that they are airlines, rather than cheap travel advice & concepts!!!

There has been long debate about Spirit since at least 2006 and who knows how long for Ryan? You know the industry is moving in this direction, as it goes past Southwest towards Spirit/Ryan way of operations.