Andy, why do you find it so hard to acknowledge that not everybody regards it as an unalloyed benefit and hence are unable to accept that for some people these changes are not welcome? Yes, of course the majority of people cope - that doesn't mean that everybody does and/or will. It doesn't surprise me that at 73 (which I agree is not old) your Mum has made the transition and has found it easy to get the hang of using IT but she is 12 years younger than my parents. Both my parents are trained touch typists and their excellent keyboard skills stand them in good stead with the electric typewriter that they still regularly use but they are 85 and that 12 years makes a huge difference.

They retired in 1988 in the pre-PC, pre-Windows era and when if you wanted a truly user friendly interface you had to pay an arm and a leg for an Apple Mackintosh. My brother and I had both stopped living with them and had our own homes some distance away from them at least 10 years earlier in the mid/late 70s, pre-Sinclair, pre-BBC B and when Amstrad made only budget audio equipment. They never had the experience that perhaps your Mum had of seeing their kids routinely use the gear - had they done so, and like Sanji had a personal technie (or just either myself or my brother close to hand) then they too might have been able to make that technological leap. But they didn't, they never had to learn to use them for their work and never had someone easily at hand to show them. My Dad has made the attempt - with my brother's guidance he bought himself a decent laptop, signed up for Virgin Broadband when they went cable for the TV at the time of the digital switchover and went to classes but found the pace was too fast for him to really absorb everything because in reality nobody else in the class was starting from the point of absolute and complete ignorance as he was. He ended up feeling defeated and demoralised, as I suspect many of us would in his position, and the laptop and Broadband are now only used by the rest of the family when we visit.

My parents are not daft or stupid, and I hope that you weren't implying that they are just because they find using computers a skill too far them at their age. They both held down very responsible senior positions in their working lives, which is perhaps part of the problem - they had junior staff who dealt with the day to day practicalities. This included my Mum, as head of a wages department, overseeing the computerisation of the wages records etc just before she retired. It's one of the reasons she decided not to work past 60 as the company would have liked her to do because she saw this as the right time to handover to the next generation and her successor that she had trained up. She made sure her staff who would actually be using them where trained up but didn't see the need to go on the training herself because she had staff who would be doing the donkey work for her. It never occurred to her, and I bet it didn't occur to many other people of her age and seniority that in 25 years time she would need to know how to use one so she could book a cheap flight!

So, yes, this change has worked well for most of EasyJet's customers in the recent past and in future will no doubt work well for all those who stick with being Easjet customers because the only people who will be using them are those who can use that system. However, on the figures you give, they are potentially going to lose the 20% of their customers who have preferred not to check-in on line so far for whatever reason. All I am asking is that you stop assuming that it will work well for everybody who would like to be an EasyJet customer and to stop dissing them for not being able to make it work for them.

SM