Summer flights of fancy

It gets hot, the Commission resorts to publicity stunts.

It’s as if the European Commission has a heat-sensitive gland for populism. As soon as the temperature starts rising, the Commission resorts to summer publicity stunts, purporting to be the friend of the consumer. 

Previous years have seen tips on avoiding sunburn and a crackdown on the lost luggage “phenomenon”.

This week (29 June) saw the launch of a two-year campaign to raise awareness of passenger rights, courtesy of the European commissioner for transport, Siim Kallas, and his new passenger-rights envoy, Meglena Kuneva, a former European commissioner.

Passenger-rights law is a serious business (as airlines facing a steep bill for compensating passengers stranded by volcanic ash know only too well) but the Commission eschewed seriousness in favour of a demotic (and sexist) stunt.

At Zaventem airport, Kallas and Kuneva posed for a photocall with a woman decked out in a wedding dress. (One of the posters features a stranded bride presumably desperate to get to her honeymoon.) At a press conference in the Berlaymont, the Commission’s headquarters, the commissioner and ex-commissioner were flanked by commissionaires, or rather by fake ‘airline stewardesses’ – three young women in fitted grey blouses and skirts with cute caps and wheelie-suitcases, each holding up an EU passenger-rights poster as if they were presenting the in-flight safety card on a 1965 Boeing 727. They belonged, it seemed, to the publicity company hired by the Commission to launch the campaign.

A year ago, Kallas was commissioner for administration, with responsibility for the Commission’s buildings. Perhaps a little smoke alarm should have gone off in his head before he succumbed to this week’s stunt. When, 13 months ago, a fire broke out in the Berlaymont, there was a painful shortage of stewards – fake or genuine – to usher people to the fire exits. But that summer stunt was not deliberate.

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