I recently took a return trip with Easyjet from Newcastle to Barcelona. The cabin crew announcements were difficult to hear because of poor diction – a feature of many budget airlines. Although a percentage of the passengers were Spanish, there was one short recorded announcement in Spanish, but all other instructions to passengers were in garbled English. There were no sandwiches available, just a restricted range of overpriced snacks of the salty/fatty/sugary variety, again a common airline feature. Coffee was vile. The fold-down table was wobbly and sloping, meaning that drinks were difficult to manage. Rubbish was only collected twice on the return trip, once when people were in the middle of drinking things and once just before descent. The crew were as smart as those dreadful orange uniforms would let them be. While I like the way Easyjet have demystified the status of cabin crew, there are much smarter ways of designing informal uniform. One of them had the most superbly applied lip gloss I have ever seen – a triumph of glamour in the face of sartorial depression ! She is obviously destined for business class on a posh airline. Crew very impersonal - probably tired. The main problem with Easyjet is its boarding procedures whereby seats are not allocated at check-in. Anyone daft enough to pay the extra few quid for preferential boarding gets killed in the rush at those airports where access to the plane is via a shuttle bus. The woman on the Easyjet departure gate at Barcelona was aggressive and inefficient. She issued contrary instructions as to where waiting people should stand and then began haranguing them when they misunderstood her. Easyjet should get a few tips from Jet2.com and BMIBaby to make things a bit slicker. I would check the alternatives before going Easyjet.