>Are there any drawbacks to having no branch that I might have overlooked, even as someone not visiting often (or at all)?
Basically none. The online-only banks have built their business around not needing a branch network. You can scan your ID with your phone to set up an account and do the same to pay in cheques. These days most bank branches are just places where they show you how to use their app anyway.
>Revolut
Careful - last time I checked, they weren't technically a bank.
>is there a way to evaluate internet banks in ethical terms
Ethicalconsumer.org have rigorously rated banks on a range of metrics, but you need to subscribe to see it. Greedy bastards. "Ethical" is just another way of dipping into my pocket. Invest my money in rhino poaching and baby murder, I don't care.
I only have experience with Revolut. Day to day, it's fine. HOWEVER, on the rare occasion that something goes wrong, there isn't anybody to call up. If you're lucky, you can get connected to somebody via their website chat app, and then only after convincing them that your question can't be satisfied via the FAQ.
This rules it out as a primary current account, but for day to day spending, it's fine.
Be careful with the challenger banks. Banks are on the hook for fraud, and the challenger banks have less money kicking around and therefore a lower risk threshold. This means that if you're doing anything more suspicious than simply paying for a pint of milk in a supermarket they're liable to just freeze your account rather than risk having to compensate you.
I'd like to better understand how they explain the continued discrepancy between genders of young drivers. Surely there's far more to it than just waiting for young lads to claim and then hiking up their premiums. I imagine they must have found some proxy for gender and weight it more heavily.
>I imagine they must have found some proxy for gender and weight it more heavily.
Oh no, of course we don't charge higher premiums to men. We did however find that people with certain names tended to claim more often - John, Mark, Darren, Muhammad, Stephen...
I know a nice Darren, he's still a goth into his thirties which I suppose is a black mark, but he's still really a nice lad, not one of those sneering, balding old goths that used to condescend to children in Games Workshop.
He drives a ferry for a living too, that's a very un-darrenlike thing to be doing.
My Darren is still a generic Limb Bizkit, Papa Roach and Linkin Park type 2000s mosher in his mid 30s. You know the sort, fat, wears shorts all the time, basically still a chav but listens to Kerrang. Has a fat useless missus who's never worked a day in her bone idle life, unless you count feeding the kids Greggs as working. They both used to hang out at the Corn Ex I think. Ahh, those were the days.
>He drives a ferry for a living too, that's a very un-darrenlike thing to be doing.
"Captain Darren" is not something I ever want to hear over a tannoy. I'm fine with Darrens driving buses, maybe Pacer trains at a push, but I don't fully trust them with anything bigger.
You'd never address a captain by their first name though, right? That'd be like saying "Mr. John" instead of "Mr. Smith", so I don't think it should be a problem over the tannoy.
Otherlad could have been driven by dozens of Darrens over the years, and never have suspected a thing.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to one of ours as "captain smith" or whatever, it's always either their first name or just their full name. If I don't know their name I'm more likely to call them 'mate' than 'captain', because fuck them. I can imagine some of the BA cunts wanting to be called by their honorific, and we did have one trainer who tried to tell people they should call the pilots 'sir', but he got fired for stealing money, so there you go.
Frankly though if your pilots name isn't something like Alastair or they don't have a double barreled surname you want to be worried. It takes a certain unquestioning dedication to authority, procedure and the established order to be a pilot and you can only really learn that at a posh 'getting bummed is part of the experience' type boarding school.
Airlines, back when they made money, used to offer grants or to cover training for povvos who proved themselves worthy. It was a good way to lock in pilots in an industry notorious for bed hopping.
These days they don't do that, and don't really pay that well either. You have to be richer than ever. Or, you can take a loan. A lot of people do, and banks are quite amenable to it because the sort of people who become pilots are not the sort of people who default on loans.
I think that the airline industry is facing real problems in the medium- to long-term. We'll see a big surge of pent-up demand for leisure travel when restrictions start to be lifted, but I think there will be a sustained reduction in business travel now that people have got used to Zoom and WFH. Some people will be itching to get back to their jetsetting lifestyle, but corporate finance departments have seen that a huge amount of their travel budget doesn't really add anything to the bottom line.
The majority of UK (and Irish) airlines, and travel agents, and particularly those companies that are both combined, are already, to be blunt, completely fucked. Most of these companies operate on an expand-every-summer plan, meaning they've already spent all your holiday money on planes, staff, and handling contracts long before you've ever gone on holiday. This works great, unless something happens that stops literally everyone going on holiday, and everyone wants their money back.
Companies like TUI are using recently booked holiday deposits to try to refund customers who couldn't fly a year ago, and it's all going to collapse on them like a house of cards. They don't own planes, they only lease them - so as soon as they look like they're fucked, they'll be forced to bankrupt and their only hope of clawing back income will disappear. This happened to Flybe the very second a corona quarantine was even considered. This will also likely impact the huge companies that lease these aircraft, because any surviving airline will not be thinking about expansion for years. Same goes for ground handling companies, who were already struggling. Very few airlines do their own baggage handling, towing etc, because the equipment and staffing involved is very expensive. You can board, service and fly a plane with about 5 ground staff, but it takes about 10 or 15 to handle bags, refuel, operate steps, tow the plane off stand, etc.
The big holiday airlines are burning through customer money, government bailouts, aircraft parking fees, continuous maintenance (you can't just leave a plane mothballed for months without stacking up very expensive liabilities, and they need to fly every few weeks to remain certified)
There is exactly ONE airline in the UK that has been recognised by the CAA as being competent and prompt with refunds. Literally just one - Jet2. They also happen to own all of their planes, and their holiday business and airline business are technically separate, though both operated under one PLC; even if all holidays are cancelled for the next five years they still own 90 odd planes. They haven't touched a penny of the government money the other airlines have eaten up, and since they're one of the only airlines that does their own ground handling, they do not need to worry about someone like Swissport collapsing and leaving them grounded.
However, they're not a cheap airline. Their tagline used to be 'friendly low fares' but they're pretty much at flag carrier prices now. I think the customer service they'd displayed over the last year will still drive a lot of people to them, because it looks like you can trust your money with them no matter what happens, but there's a huge chunk of punters that can't and won't pay £400 for a flight to the canaries and back when Ryanair does it for £15.
Jet2 are probably an airline you've never heard of unless you're northern, but I expect them to be making big plays as soon as they can, because they're in such a massively good position compared to anyone else. The industry rumour at the start of the pandemic was they could operate for an entire year with zero flights and still be net positive in cash, which is a bit mental for any company, but 1000x so for an airline.
BA will also be fine, because their domestic flights will not ever lose momentum, and they don't really lease aircraft, with the exception of having to wet lease to replace their dodgy 787s a while back, but that's priced in to a BA ticket.
I don't think we'll see any of the big tourist airlines disappear completely within the next few years, as they have investors with deep pockets who will keep them afloat, but ticket prices will be up and flight frequency and certainly expansion will hit the floor. TUI has their fingers in cruiseliners too, and a strong Dreamliner fleet that basically print money, but they're still the shakiest in my opinion. Easyjet have very strong slots and serve the majority of northern irish tourism travel and short domestic, so they'll take a hit but I can't see them bankrupting. If they own planes (I don't know and can't be arsed to look) they will sell or lease a portion of them, or else just pare down the fleet. Ryanair fly too many internal spanish flights to be in real trouble, but pre pandemic their plan was to move their bases to smaller, cheaper airports to cut even more costs, so I can imagine doing that more quickly and more dramatically than they were. A Ryanair pilot also pointed out to be that they could double the price of every single ticket and still more than likely be the cheapest possible flight to any given destination, so there's that too.
Most other big airlines do cargo routes and will have continued to do that all through the last year, so again might not be filing for bankruptcy, but will be hurting for a long time. It'll just be job losses across the board rather than collapses, but it's airlines, we're very used to watching them go bust.
I have spent many nights awake trying to work out how Eastern are still operating, I suppose it's because they still fly oil and gas workers out to the rigs and such, and because their planes are dodgy washing machines.
I completely forgot to address your point about business travel - I think you're right, I can't see how anyone can justify business travel again after this. I'm firmly on the tourism side of the industry though, so can't offer perfect insight into this, but I will say that a lot of the business flights I've dealt with are either lucrative charters or otherwise key personnel who need to be in a specific place to do a specific thing - I wouldn't be surprised if the "meet in person to talk business" type of ticket was only a small slice of the pie in the first place. I will try and get solid numbers.
>>8470 > I completely forgot to address your point about business travel - I think you're right, I can't see how anyone can justify business travel again after this.
I work in what is probably one of the few industries that absolutely cannot do away with business travel completely so I'm probably biased the other way. I know for a fact that the company I work for has a lot of clients with massive contracts just waiting until we can get people travelling again.
I do agree that the majority of business travel is just people just going on a jolly while using a sales pitch or update meeting as an excuse for an expensive lunch and taking the missus to a nice hotel if you can wing it. I definitely feel that with any luck a lot of that kind of thing will finally be moved online.
