You have to take opportunities when you can,  so with my daughter away on a school trip to New York (the furthest I ever went was Scarborough) we decided to have a  weekend away in Norfolk.

Now the last time I went to Norfolk, I was about 12 years old – a two week caravan holiday in Great Yarmouth. I can remember very little about it,  other than it rained, and certainly  nothing of the journey. That’s  just as well, because if I had remembered the journey,  I’d have probably gone somewhere else.

To get to Norfolk from where I live, you have to travel along the A17 between Sleaford and Kings Lynn. And as I discovered last Friday morning, this is almost certainly the most boring stretch of road in Britain. The A17 has a fairly poor accident record, and I think I know why – it’s extremely  tempting to steer into oncoming traffic just to relieve the tedium. My wife, who lapses into unconsciousness on even the shortest journey, stayed resolutely awake on this one. She was genuinely terrified that I would fall asleep, such was the lack of any sensory stimulation.

Mile after mile of straight, flat tarmac stretches before you on the A17, every inch  of it bordered by hedgerow-starved fields. Most seem to  contain nothing…or cauliflowers. The ‘architecture’ is a mix of what appear to be abandoned farm buildings and crappy 1960’s style  bungalows surrounded by unkempt gardens, scattered randomly across the landscape.  There are a lot of bungalows. I don’t think people in Lincolnshire have a head for heights. Or maybe it’s just not worth building a bedroom with a view when there’s nothing to see.

Occasionally you will come across a  larger house surrounded by 40 foot Leylandii.  I’m not sure whether the owners are trying to block the view of the house from the road, or the view of the road from the house.  The latter is definitely a good idea. At one point I noticed a sorry-looking  motel and marvelled at who might stay there…and why. I came up with a short list that included breakdown victims, truckers hookers and escaped prisoners holding hostages,  but ran out of ideas after that.

Abandoned, rusty cars must be status symbols around these parts because everyone seems to have one in their front garden. The only other things of note are myriad discount retail emporia, heralded by signs that look like they’ve been written by a dyslexic hyperactive seven year old let loose with some paint. It’s sort of how you’d imagine the whole country might look about 20 years post-holocaust, when some signs of civilisation are starting to return, but you are still painfully aware that something awful must have happened.

In an attempt to relieve the boredom, we embarked on a game of I Spy. It didn’t last long…

Her:  “I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘f’.”

Me:  “Is it ‘field’?”

Her: “Bugger!”

Eventually though, the road passes over a bridge traversing a muddy river and you end up in Norfolk, which isn’t bad at all. The tarmac starts to turn, the landscape starts to roll, and trees which haven’t been purchased from a garden centre, solely for their fast-growing and eyesore-masking properties, start to emerge. We eventually arrived at the spa hotel we’d booked, which was excellent. It had some interesting elements to its pricing and customer services offering which I’ll come back to in a moment. But the only reason I got to thinking about that at all, was a chance encounter with a celebrity the next day.

Are you keeping up with this? I’m glad someone is!

Anyway,  on Saturday morning we ended up in a place called Burnham Market. I’d never heard of it before, but the guide book in the hotel described it as ‘Chelsea-By-The Sea’. The number of chic, expensive shops and blinged up Range Rovers on the High Street certainly backed up the label. Apparently Johnny Depp owns a house in the town, but my celebrity encounter wasn’t quite as A-List as that.

As I strolled along the High Street, a rather dishevelled looking Rory McGrath emerged from a hardware store carrying two white carrier bags stuffed with goodness-knows-what.   As we approached each other we did that little side-to-side dance people do when they’re not sure  which way the other person is going, before he disappeared off into the distance.

I’d have thought no more about the encounter, but then two days later I switched  on my TV to see McGrath on a late night political panel show discussing a variety of topics. I realised pretty quickly that he hadn’t looked dishevelled on Saturday morning…he just is dishevelled! I’m sure he was wearing the same clothes I saw him doing his shopping in. I realised something else as well…we share a common hatred of airports and budget air travel

Part of the programme  was about  the merits and demerits of taking holidays in the UK versus overseas, and the discussion inevitably turned to budget airlines like Ryanair. I have always point-blank refused to travel with Ryanair, and have made various grumpy-old-man style rants in their direction, but have never really got to the heart of the problem – or rather, my problem, to be strictly accurate.  Listening to that discussion, and then juxtaposing a typical Ryanair experience with what I’d recently experienced at that Spa hotel in Norfolk, brought it all into focus.

When I booked the hotel, it was a very open and transparent process. The room wasn’t cheap, but the  cost  was clearly explained, as was the price of an upgrade and what benefits that would bring. When we arrived there were no nasty surprises – in fact quite the reverse. We were offered complementary newspapers, informed that all phone calls from the room would be free of charge, and were directed to a  cupboard containing free drinks and home made cookies. We actually got more for our money than we thought we were getting when we booked the room. Now compare that with a typical Ryanair experience.

The basic cost of the flight will be relatively low, but from there on it is only the most cautious and diligent passengers that emerge from the process having paid anything like what they expected.  You need your wits about you. Take a bag that’s slightly too big or heavy, or fail to have all your paperwork in order, and you’ll face an  additional punitive charges which is out of all proportion to the original price, or the incremental cost of dealing with the transgression. This isn’t the sort of upsell process which American companies do so well,  in which customers are coaxed into spending more than they intended, but rather a seemingly deliberate attempt to make things difficult so that customers unwittingly fall foul of the rules and be forced to pay extra. Add in the fact that anything beyond a basic seat on the plane incurs an additional charge,  and the initial price quoted is unlikely to be a close indication of the final bill.

There’s nothing illegal about this of course, in fact Ryanair have ensured that they are watertight in this regard, but it does illustrate the opposite end of the spectrum from which companies can deal with pricing and managing customer expectations. At one end you have a hotel that quotes a price, sticks to it and even throws in some bonus’s after the contract is made. At the other you have an airline that  quote an initial price, charge for every conceivable extra and then use the rest of the transaction fulfilment process to squeeze as much additional money out of the customer as they can.

Now I’m sure  Ryanair would argue that the average customer  still ends up paying less with them than their competitors, and that doing things this way benefits those who are ‘savvy’  and don’t want to pay for things they don’t really need. Both of these things are probably true, and the company is extremely successful.   Just because I don’t happen to like the way they do business, and choose to spend my money elsewhere, certainly doesn’t mean we  should reject the lessons of the business model wholesale. But all of this does raise an important question.

What’s the best pricing model for you and your business?

Is it one like the hotel, where everything is open, transparent and included – and where customers get more than they expect after the contract is under way. Or is it one like the budget airline, where you hook people in on a seemingly low price and then put systems and processes in place to extract as much additional revenue as possible from the transaction afterwards?

I think a lot will depend on your personal ethics and what you feel most comfortable with.  It’s proven that both approaches can work.  Companies like Ryanair survive and prosper for a reason. A large part of any market  is prepared to tolerate an awful lotof pain  in pursuit of what they perceive to be a low price. The success of  businesses offering transparent pricing and ‘beyond expectation’ service shows that there’s a significant market sector for whom price isn’t the primary consideration, and they’re prepared to pay more for better.

Choose the Ryanair route, and you may find yourself looking over your shoulder, struggling to retain customers  and constantly fighting a customer service fire. Choose the spa hotel route, and you may find yourself frustrated as you see a large part of the potential  market gravitate towards the cheap and cheerless, irrespective of  the true value on offer. There are no right and wrong answers.

The reality of course, is that there is a continuum in place here, and there are numerous alternatives to consider between these two extremes. And I think you should consider them.. You see, once you set out down one path it’s not easy to go back. Nobody is going to easily accept Ryanair as a born-again premium service provider any more than they are likely to accept  Claridges as the epitome of cheap and cheerful accommodation. You become what you’re perceived to be and perceptions don’t tend to shift easily.

As we headed home, back down the A17, a belligerent tractor driver reduced the entire carriageway to a 20mph  crawl and then refused to pull over for about 7 miles. I discerned from the honking horns and hand gestures that this wasn’t appreciated, or indeed the ‘done thing’,  but for once I was fairly relaxed. I realised that the driver probably lived locally, and having the power to irritate a couple of hundred motorists for 15 minutes had to be very poor recompense for that.