Easyjet launched its £29 Glasgow-to-London flight 30 years ago this month, but what’s the cost really, asks Mark Smith

What were you doing in November 1995? Me: I’d just moved to Glasgow and was in my early 20s so I was mainly eating plates of noodles at the Canton Express on Sauchiehall Street at two in the morning. November 1995 was also, you may remember, when Princess Diana did that interview with Panorama and the Chancellor cut income tax. Thirty years on, Panorama and income tax are still in the news, for all the wrong reasons I’m afraid.

November 1995 was significant in another way too – one that’s still affecting us. EasyJet launched a new service between Glasgow and Luton, with tickets from £29, which seemed like an extraordinary price then and seems like an extraordinary price now. But it worked: easyJet today has hundreds of planes, thousands of routes, and millions of passengers (and profits). It also led to other cheap airlines, increased competition and made flying more affordable. Judged on those metrics, it has been an undoubted success.

But even though I’ve used easyJet many times myself (who hasn’t?) I worry that what started in November 1995 – the idea that you can fly from the central belt of Scotland to the south of England for 29 quid – has turned out to be more curse than blessing. I don’t mean the success of easyJet as a business – I don’t begrudge them that and as I say, I’ve been a customer many times, I mean the expectations it has led to, expectations that do not match the consequences.

What’s really extraordinary is how little the bottom-line price of an easyJet ticket has changed since '95. For comparison, the average price of a pint of........

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