Thomas Cook Airlines is all prepared to remove existing in-flight entertainment systems from almost all of its aircraft. Instead, passengers would be charged £7.50 for the use of hand-held Playstation Portables, or PSPs.

Passengers on all short and medium-haul flights will be offered the alternative of hiring the devices, which will come pre-loaded with eight feature films and a collection of television programs as well as video games.

Ian Derbyshire, Thomas Cook's Chief Executive Officer, made claims that just one in 10 passengers actually watch the airline’s present in-flight entertainment.

Thomas Cook's final decision to replace rented headphones, for which they charge a minute amount of fee, with PSPs follows parallel moves by other airlines, which includes US-based Frontier Airlines, and easyJet, which introduced PSP hire as an option in the month of April, also coming at a cost at £7.50.

Research carried out by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics in the preceding month exposed that US carriers’ additional charges have witnessed an increase by at least 42% since 2008.

Ryanair has raised its extra charges by almost 700% since 2006. It launched the experiment of a hand-held entertainment system in the month of November 2004 where passengers were charged £5 to use the devices, but cancelled the project just five months afterwards because of a lack of interest shown by passengers.