Welcome to the third age of air passenger travel. In the first, when air travel was the transport mode of the elite, the mini-champagne bottles fizzed regularly as passengers were schmoozed through the air at high prices.
In the second, democracy arrived and we all got a chance to fly at fabulously low fares, though one by one the frills were taken away.
Now, in this third age, the frills are still gone, but so are the low prices that lured the masses into air travel. Well, not quite gone, as the base fares offered by low-cost airlines remain nominally low. But as even the dimmest traveller must have copped by now, by the time all the extra charges, taxes, surcharges and fees are added on, much of the value has gone from the original bargain.
Air travel now resembles an obstacle course; the smartest and most flexible can still negotiate their way through the traps laid by the airlines in their pricing schemes, not to mention Government charges. You still meet people who claim to have flown to a European city for €1, though they may neglect to add they left before 7.30am, didn't actually fly to the city and paid a lot to take a taxi or bus into town.
The rest of us aren't so lucky. We pay for insurance we don't need, or baggage we don't bring. Or we fail to check in baggage when booking online and get hit for punitive charges at the airport. We pay for infants, even though they sit on our lap. We pay extra for paying by credit card, even the airline's own credit card. We're penalised heavily for bringing more than one bag, or excess baggage, or golf clubs. There's more to pay if we want to be sure we sit beside our children, or if we want to board before others.
If the plane leaves late, we're told to wait; if we arrive late by the airline's definition, we're told to pay up for another flight. If we don't use our tickets, the airline keeps the Government tax. We're encouraged to put more baggage in the hold for security reasons and then hit for excess baggage charges. And for heaven's sake, don't forget your ID, even if not required for passport control when travelling to Britain, or you might be bumped off the flight.
In this office, colleagues had the following bad experiences in the past fortnight alone: one spent €500 getting home after his Ryanair flight never turned up at its destination in northern Spain; another was forced to pay €180 to check in a second bag on a British Airways flight from Istanbul to London; a third was forced to pay an extra €48 in airport registration charges on baggage for a Ryanair flight to France; and another colleague paid £170 to get from London to Dublin after missing his original flight.
There are dozens of pitfalls waiting to catch out the unsuspecting traveller. The good news is that air fares are still cheaper - by about half - than they were in the bad old days of no competition. Just don't fall into the many traps lining the route from your home PC to the airport check-in desk.