An airline and me - which one is the fool?

Tuesday, 4 April 2023

Air New Zealand economy passengers who want extra legroom will have to pay $175 for an Economy Stretch seat.

Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright

OPINION: You have to admire corporations. For their greed, for their gall, for their sheer chutzpah. They milk us as maids milk cows.

To celebrate my 66th birthday we decided to go on a jaunt and went to the Air New Zealand website. The website had remembered all my details - that noise in your ear is Orwell chuckling - and told me that I had over a hundred dollars of Airpoints to spend. Woohoo. Up rose that sense of getting something for nothing. Oh, we are fools perpetual.

I booked two seats on a flight to the North Island and pressed the little button to redeem my Airpoints. But no. I was allowed to spend only $10 of those Airpoints. The reason? There was no reason. The rules were the rules and Air New Zealand wrote them and that was that. Money that appeared to be mine to spend as I wished wasn’t mine to spend as I wished. And if I expected it to be otherwise, my inner Pollyanna had overridden my inner Kafka.

But that wasn’t the end of the story and Kafka would have admired what followed. Before paying for the tickets I chose our seats. And for the privilege of choosing our seats I had to pay a fee, this fee being in addition to the quoted fare.

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01012022Mugshots. Staff photos. Headshots. Columnist Joe Bennett. Stuff staff mugshot Feb 2022.

You will have guessed the next part. The lowest-priced seat cost $5 to book. So, with a neatness that the world rarely serves up, the cost of booking two seats was $10, which just happened to be the amount that I appeared to have saved by having Airpoints. The lord giveth and the lord taketh away. As I say, one can only admire the nakedness of the cynicism.

The fault, of course, lies not with Air New Zealand or with any other corporation that dangles bait. The fault lies with us who swallow it, who still worship, in defiance of a lifetime of experience, at the altar of the Apparent Free Lunch.

Corporations are selfish by definition. They must make a profit or die. That’s their legal DNA. They exist only to perpetuate themselves.

Evolutionary principles suggest that you and I exist only to perpetuate ourselves as well, but we don’t see it that way. We are sentimental creatures and we like to believe there are higher feelings than selfishness and greed.

Corporations know this, so they bait the hook with language from a nicer moral universe. Instead of writing of bribes in exchange for our custom, they speak of loyalty programmes, of us earning the rewards we deserve. It is flattery. It is as if we were knights of the Round Table.

But we are not knights of the Round Table any more than Air New Zealand is. I am precisely as loyal to Air New Zealand as Air New Zealand is to me. If a rival offered the same service more cheaply I would desert Air New Zealand on the instant.

Indeed, the only significant difference between me and Air New Zealand, I suspect, is that Air New Zealand isn’t fool enough to expect a free lunch.

P.S. I enjoyed my Trump Indictment Champagne so much that I have laid in more in a range of bottle sizes. They start with the Mugshot Mini - to be drunk this week - and end some time early next year in an orgasmic eruption of bubbles from the Jailtime Jeroboam.

Footnote: CORRECTION: The fourth paragraph of this story has been altered to correct the impression that choosing seats when booking online with Air New Zealand is mandatory. This step can be skipped and a seat be automatically allocated at no cost (Amended: April 5, 2023 12:10pm).