Die folgende Schmähkritik ist tatsächlich ein kleines Wunderwerk: ein ausgiebiger Rant über das Priority Boarding bzw. die „speedy boarders“ (also die Möglichkeit für Flugpassagiere gegen einen Aufpreis als erster in einem Flugzeug sitzen zu können), der sich aber in seiner letzten Zeile ins Gegenteil verkehrt und seinen eigentlichen Gegner (Ryan Air) offenbart. Hut ab. Kein Wunder, dass der Text sehr häufig missverstanden wurde.
„Nobody likes a speedy boarder. That’s just a fact, plain and simple. People who purchase priority boarding upgrades on low-cost airlines are genuinely worse than the devil. They’re snooty and snobby, and the only way they can distinguish themselves from the unwashed plebs they’re forced to share a plane with is by spending a fiver for the privilege of sitting in it first. They’re people who go on the internet specifically to pretend not to know who Kim Kardashian is. They are the absolute living worst.
They’re so bad that they’ve even done the unthinkable and made Ryanair look halfway good. Ryanair, for crying out loud: a company that’s inherently impossible to like. A company that made its name with unremitting unpleasantness as standard, run by a silent-movie baddie on a gap year from tying women to railway lines, has somehow come out of a policy announcement looking decent. Ryanair has just announced its intention to force everyone who uses a wheelie bag as hand luggage to purchase a priority boarding pass. On the surface, this is simply to address issues of space. On a plane with 189 seats, they say, there is only enough space in the overhead lockers for 90 bags. (…)
Whether intentionally or not, it’s actually helping to weed out latent speedy boarders. The people who are speedy boarders at heart – the sort of people who ignore the homeless and watch illegally streamed films for free, the sort of people who look at you with a dumb I’d-help-if-I-could expression when you ask for them to move their bag from an empty seat on a crowded train – but can’t commit to paying extra to make their monstrousness explicit, are gradually being edged out into the daylight.
But now these people have been forced out into the open. If they want to maintain their selfishness, they’re going to have to pay for it. They’re going to have to let everyone else on the plane know upfront what exactly a swaggering pranny they are. The bell will ring in the departure gate, and they’ll announce “Can everyone who labours under the woeful apprehension that they’re somehow better than you please come to the front of the line?”, and the rest of us will watch, silently committing their bovine faces to memory.
Honestly, I think Ryanair could have probably gone a little further with this plan. Hopefully its next policy will involve leading the speedy boarders to the plane with a bell-ringing nun who keeps chanting the word “Shame” at them. Or, better yet, special badges for speedy boarders to wear, so that everyone else can single them out and understand the depths of their depravity. Or, you know, slightly bigger overhead lockers. Whichever’s easiest, really.“
(Stuart Heritage im Guardian über die neue „Boarding“-Policy von Ryan Air)
