Articles
On flying To Morocco
- NEWS
- 07/29/12
A. Fahmi
Ticket pricing has little to do with distances. It is all about competition on a specific Point-to-Point route. RAM and Air France seem to be in collusion as duopolies on the greatest-margin leg, Paris-Rabat/Casablanca. Roya Air Maroc could probably drop all destinations and keep only Paris, their margin would go through the roof.
There must be something right about their pricing if the planes are full from the US to Casablanca during the Summer. There is enough demand to drive the pricing up.
Is it shortsighted? Only if planes are empty. Now that I live in Europe, we are dealing with the exactly same issue except that Easyjet has really driven prices down albeit requiring us to drive to an airport here and there to catch the deals.
I think Brussels and Milan must have the cheapest prices and it is all due to the low cost carriers. The real question is: how come no other airline flies US-Casablanca given the full planes? That is a more sensible request. The answer is probably predictable: do you want to cut RAM's cash cows? I still have my RAM ticket from 1989. I checked the price on it: 7800 Dhs. How much have prices gone up in the last 23 years? One would think Oil Prices are the most significant drivers, aside from overall inflation of labor.
It just feels like prices have barely moved in 2-3 decades in real terms.
What is happening now is ironic: while someone is keeping Roya Air Maroc semi-afloat through route monopoly, I take my family to Asia to enjoy 6-star hotels on Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Qatar Air, Etihad. Those vacations cost us 'about' the same as in Morocco ( excluding the hotel ).
The real loser in all of this is the Moroccan economy as a whole given we usually end up spending on average $3000 a week elsewhere than in Morocco. What I would ask RAM, and it is just an ask not a right, is preferential pricing for Moroccans residing outside of Morocco. Some kind of a 'one-ticket a year at a fixed price', just one, not regular discounts.
What these chaps do not realize is that the more they make Morocco out of reach, the higher the chances they are losing the second generation of Moroccans born outside of Morocco. And that will hurt in a few years. There is such thing as total value of this 'relationship'. I guess no one is thinking about the long term impact. Someone will once the remits start falling down and they will eventually do so.
In terms of service, know please that the flight attendants are not Roya Air Maroc employees. They have outsourced that service. It is pathetic to have done so. I am not stating this as a fact but as what 4 RAM employees told me, 2 pilots and 2 in HR department.
If that is the case, it explains the much lower quality of service in the last 3 decades. The point is, they pay these outsourced folks much much lower wages than what they used to pay full time employees.
I am no big fan of the European airlines. They are on a strict minimum service and they are also struggling. They are better than RAM in terms of 'responsibility' and 'accountability' though. It is only when I started flying Asian airlines that I realized what excellent service is.
Note that this year a family of three from Europe will not head to Morocco for Ramadan because of the tickets costing us $2100 total. Those $2100 are for a 3-hour flight ... we are boycotting Morocco, not Roya Air Maroc, despite our love for the country and family members. You can imagine that with school calendars it becomes literally impossible to find a good deal.
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Comments (6)
Not a right, just a once per year ticket.
It is the tourist that helps to prop up the Moroccan economy - more so than a Moroccan who chooses to leave his country and then expects cheap flights back home when he needs to return home!
Welcome to the real world A. Fahmi
How about cheap RAM flights for tourists?
Not a right, just a once per year ticket.
We have no objection in this matter and yes everybody should have a resonable price ticket. However, it looks to me like you are missing the point here when you said:
It is the tourist that helps to prop up the Moroccan economy - more so than a Moroccan who chooses to leave his country and then expects cheap flights back home when he needs to return home!
First of all not only tourists that are helping to prop up the Moroccan economy. There are so many Moroccans that are helping …and in fact they spend more money than a tourist may have spent when visiting morocco. Yes, we choose to leave our country for better life, but how about our children, who were born here (just like you with probably a father / mother, grand father immigrants and who choose to leave their original country too..? did they also choose to leave morocco and come to USA? They were born here and they have all right to go back to visit their heritage…famili es…etc….imagine Mr. Paul if you have 5 children and they all need to go to visit grandmother in morocco, imagine how much money you will need to pay RAM??? This is what we are talking about, it’s not a one ticket for a one person, it’s more than that. Here you will feel the pain. Right? Believe it or not, I know a girl here in USA and as we speak now she is trying to find a fair price ticket to go to Morocco with her daughter who she is just turned 2 years old and she needs to pay a full price ticket. She is suffering, because she is not working and she couldn’t afford it.
With all respect,
Father with children
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