Rishon Rishon

Money to burn

What do you think about this example of Israeli ingenuity? Repulsed? Embarrassed? I was amused.

Passengers were issued €15-vouchers for food, wine, beer, soft drinks, and snacks on two-way flights.

Issta Lines managing director Ahishai Gal said that Israelis were simply unaccustomed to the method, which is used all over the world. The Transavia CEO said, “If someone buys food for €13, he wants to give his unused balance to someone else, who wants to buy food for €17, without paying the extra €2. The stewardesses would have had to run up and down the plane with calculators in order to keep track of the Israelis passengers’ arithmetic. This method makes it possible to use one less stewardess on each flight, but we would have had to add a stewardess on flights to Israel to keep order.”

Understand the problem: If you have a 15 euro voucher, and you only want to buy 13 euros of food, but your neighbor wants to buy 17 euros worth, you can pool your vouchers and together use all 30 euros. Evidently Europeans are not energetic enough, or cooperative enough to do such a thing – they just throw away the extra 2 euros, and let the guy who would like to use it suffer. I think this indifference to the allocation of resources in Europe is telling.

The sad part is that Transavia discontinued the voucher system altogether, when there’s a simple solution: issue 15 vouchers of 1 euro each, and let people swap them.