Which means that (i) they'll lookup the price and be upsold a package on Ryanair.com rather than finding the price and a different hotel deal on some other price comparison site and (ii) they'll still buy tickets from Ryanair.com at non-promotional rates when they're actually not the cheapest airline offering a viable route and time. And of course (iii) he can fill his flights without sharing revenues with online travel agents and other affiliates, though other low cost airlines without the reputation for taking things to extreme lengths manage that.
Although part of it's probably just his style. Not sure there was any strategy to his comments that "I don't care if no-one likes me. I'm not a cloud bunny or an aerosexual. I don't like aeroplanes. I never wanted to be a pilot like those other platoons of goons who populate the airline industry..."
I wonder if the aggressive upselling during the booking flow is part of this marketing too. If you really want the cheapest possible flight you will carefully decline all upsells and double-check the final bill for surcharges. This makes you feel you’ve shrewdly whittled the price down as far as possible.
Another way of looking at it is it just wears the customer down. If the booking flow were too smooth and didn’t include many points where the customer is forced to decline added luxuries, then you might be more likely to pause before confirming the transaction, and maybe open EasyJet’s site for a quick price comparison.
When you entrust care of people you love to a company, you tend to expect more than capitalism tuned to the extreme.
And before you ask, yes, that’s exactly what happened to a family member of mine. “Wheelchair assistance” never showed up.
What about the one incident in 2004 when they had to be taken to the High Court, on behalf of hundreds or thousands, to provide the legally required wheelchair transfers? Or the one incident where the disabled lad was left behind a day? Or the many one incidents disabled users have reported of being dropped from Ryanair flights because the airline couldn't be arsed to spend the time? Or the many single incidents of wheelchair users reporting that despite the UK and Irish court rulings Ryanair weren't allowing access to the wheelchair at the destination airports?
I've never heard of the incident you mention btw, but the thousands of reports are plenty to give me a view of Ryanair were I ever to end up disabled.
So, no not worth it for the slight difference of price they offer.
I rode the Pittsburgh to Washington D.C./Baltimore route on May 20th 2019.
One case that comes to mind is Ikea with this DIY approach. Is it the most convenient way to buy furniture? Not really given the work you need to do. Prof Moon argues that this paradoxically creates a stickiness to the brand because you have invested something (time and effort).
Another one is the "In-n-out" burger joint(Forgive me if I have gotten the name wrong). Apparently, it takes a full 15-20 minutes to get a burger here but it is thriving in-spite of this difficulty because people know they're not getting some frozen processed food.
[1]https://www.amazon.in/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme...
No passenger thinks he’s a lovable scamp or a shrewd businessman. They just buy the fare they can afford and justify, if it happens to be Ryanair then ... grin and bear it.
Ryanair don’t fly to London btw. Or Brussels.
I have wasted too much of my time in delayed trains trying to get into London to believe that.
And based on travel times you could add some other airports to that list of London Airports. Southampton Airport is faster to get to than Stansted or Luton for a lot of Londoners. And with HS2 BHX could probably change its name too.
Ryanair demand subsidies from local governments to fly to far-flung airports. They can hold these governments hostage, as often the airports fail if they stop their service. Of course, this could be seen as simply "bad management" by our local governments.
And to finish, though this is something that applies to all airlines : no VAT or "eco" tax, that the rest of us have to pay.
In a sense, economics is entirely about what people like and dislike.
I’m sure positive externalities are a thing, but direct benefits to one party in a transaction aren’t externalities.
Of course, nobody is twisting the arm of these politicians. But the fact remains that Ryanair is exploiting this weakness to avoid paying themselves.
Type "Ryanair airport subsidies" in google and have a look at the first couple of titles. It's a mess that has been going on for 10 years now and is only now slowly being called a halt to.
https://www.transportenvironment.org/press/24-ryanair-airpor...
Brussels itself is only 1h54 from central London!
And that distance stuff is normal, because on the longer distances you're going on high-speed trains. If you were a Millwall (a London team) fan who lived just south of The Den and by some divine chance you were to play Arsenal (another London team) at The Emirates (god forbid), it'd take you just as long by transit to get there as it would take someone who's commuting from Market Harborough (80 miles North) to St. Pancras (London's big international rail terminus). But it's laughable to claim that Market Harborough is part of London or that either of the Emirates and the Den are not.
That image will keep them going right up until they have a fatal crash, at which point the press, the government, and victims’ attorneys will use every word he has ever said about being cheap to crucify him and the company. Given their volume of flights, a fatal crash is statistically likely to happen at some point. I would be very careful ever making such statements if I were in such an industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines#Accidents_a...
Southwest has one of the best, if not the best, safety records of all major air carriers.
They are smaller than Southwest on most (not all) metrics, but in the same ballpark.
Their only accident is a bird strike causing 8 minor injuries.
True, but Southwest does not have a CEO that openly flaunts their being cheap either.
They've never had a major crash in almost 35 years.
I once won 15 hands of blackjack in a row, but then I lost a hand. Even the most expensive airlines eventually have fatal incidents, and it would be statistically improbable for Ryanair to not eventually have one as well. They may have an amazing safety record and stellar maintenance program, but the nature of flight is such that it is likely to eventually happen (perhaps through no fault of their own) if they are in business long enough. Whether “cheapness” will actually be a factor in that incident or not, people will take his prior statements and run with them.
All I was saying is that making such statements in a high-risk industry is not a fantastic idea, as those words may come back to bite him.
So your entire argument is people are dumb and they will make unwarranted associations. Brilliant
My argument is that it is idiotic for a CEO in such an industry to make comments about being cheap. It leaves the door open for people to place blame when an accident occurs. It’s like talking to the police if they want to interrogate you. It can’t help, but it can hurt. Why would you risk it?
The guy is doing a cheap airline, not an unsafe one. He’s not a madman. He’s a ruthless business guy, and he knows a crash due to poor maintenance would end his business.
Because they hurl large, heavy, metal objects with people on them into the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, thousands of times per day. Historically, that activity has resulted in some small percentage of those flights not coming down safely. The math says that it is quite likely to happen over the course of enough flights.
I have flown Ryanair a few times, I’d rather not go than take them today though.
Has Ryanair flown more flights than all the domestic and international commercial jet flights in Australian history? Because there has never been a crash of a commercial jet here despite several near misses.
Safety culture and training has more of a bearing than statistics.
Ironically, I was extremely happy with everything after baggage drop-off. The flight itself was no worse than any other airline, in my eyes (I don't consider ads to meaningfully worsen a flight). The airport (Hahn, serving almost only Ryanair back then) was amazing, with super-friendly airport (not airline!) staff and short walking distances.
But their atrocious web site (AFAIK checking in required you to concatenate two random values and enter them in one form field, in the one working flow out of the 3-4 that were offered) and their outright, aggressive rudeness left a much stronger permanent impression than the (probably low) price, the two-hour bus ride to the middle-of-nowhere airport, or the flight itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_O%27Leary_(businessman...