[lettie]

Many airlines and holiday companies are actually aspiring to be budget carriers IMO. Me and Sparks have flown with Thompson and Thomas Cook in the last couple of years and have found them to be scraping the bottom of the barrell. There's no way I would pay extra for a meal on the plane, who's going to pay for that rubbish???
What bugged me though is that at check in there were notices that said that if you pay an extra £30 or so, you could have extra legroom seats. These extra legroom seats include the emergency exit seats. We had a bit of a dispute in Tenerife with the check in clerk for Thomas Cook. We are both young, fit and able to assist other people in an emergency but we would not pay for the extra legroom so the seats were payed for and taken by elderly more infirm people, one of whom slept from the minute we took off to the minute we landed. It seems that the aspiration to be a budget airline could potentially compromise the safety of passengers. Emergency exit seats should be given to people who are fit enough to help others and not sold to the highest bidder.