Minister Aridi Wants You To Pay Higher Prices for MEA Tickets

Transport Minister Ghazi Al Aridi defended yesterday the high prices of Middle East Airlines tickets:

the minister said that the high fuel prices in the international markets have affected the current rates. He also called for regulating the open sky policy in Lebanon so that competition can be fairer.

“regulating the open sky policy in Lebanon” is a nice way of saying “killing the competition and giving Lebanese flyers less options”. Mr. Aridi will not admit that MEA as a state controlled company is rife with inefficiencies. In the same breath, he complains that fuel price is very high (a burden shared by all airlines) and that there is a lot of competition (which is a good thing because it forces airlines to reduce their costs and differentiate their services)

As one aviation expert once commented on this blog:

MEA has to look at its own operation and figure out how to increase productivity and reduce cost. I do not mean staff issues here only. But more on the productivity of the fleet and the network […] MEA may have a capacity problem. They seriously have to look at their network and their aircraft utilization and redo the numbers.

By “staff issues” he meant the fact that politicians needlessly staff MEA with political proteges who are paid ticket-payer money without producing any value for the company.

When you pay a large amount of money for an MEA ticket, you have to keep in mind that a part of it being pocketed by useless political appointees (multiply that by the number of sects that “have to be represented” in the company). In the past, consumers responded to that by choosing different airlines. But Mr. Aridi doesn’t like that. He wants to kill that option for us by messing with the open skies policy.