Cheap Flights (13/02/14)
Ryanair's boss, Michael O'Leary, must be chuckling to himself at all the free publicity generated by his company's new charm offensive - which lots of journalists seem to hate for some reason.
Take this interview by someone called Lynn Barber from the Sunday Times who, I assume, is a serious journalist - in which case why talk about being 'dumped' at obscure airports miles from anywhere with no transport into town.
Because it's simply not true.
I've flown with Ryanair on many occasions and there have always been buses into the nearest town and sometimes that involves a bit of a journey, as with Beauvais which is two hours from Paris.
But if people want to fly straight into Paris, or Frankfurt for that matter, then of course they can - so long as they pay a carrier like British Airways two, three or four times the cost of a Ryanair fare.
Cabin pressure
Michael O’Leary, the fast-talking, outspoken boss of Ryanair, has had his wings clipped — he says he is finally listening to his customers
By Lynn Barber
During that time I've only once been badly delayed flying with Ryanair - and that was due to a strike by air traffic controllers in France.
But I flew across the Atlantic twice last year with British Airways only to be delayed five hours each time - which was really, really irritating and inconvenient as well.
British Airways also got right up my nose when the airline jacked up the cost of flights from Canada a few of years ago - where I was stranded because of the fall out from the Icelandic volcano which grounded transatlantic flights for over 10 days..
And if you asked me to choose between the 'snooty' British Airways cabin staff and Michael O'Leary's team - I'd vote for Ryanair every time because the other lot are not remotely worth the extra money.
Less than livestock indeed, I wonder how much Natalie got paid to write this drivel because I suspect her real problem is that she is just another air travel snob.
Ryanair's profit warning: Flying is an exhausting business, made even worse by budget behaviour
By Natalie Haynes
Book with them, and know your money is going to a company that doesn’t even try to veil its contempt for its customers
Take this interview by someone called Lynn Barber from the Sunday Times who, I assume, is a serious journalist - in which case why talk about being 'dumped' at obscure airports miles from anywhere with no transport into town.
Because it's simply not true.
I've flown with Ryanair on many occasions and there have always been buses into the nearest town and sometimes that involves a bit of a journey, as with Beauvais which is two hours from Paris.
But if people want to fly straight into Paris, or Frankfurt for that matter, then of course they can - so long as they pay a carrier like British Airways two, three or four times the cost of a Ryanair fare.
Cabin pressure
Michael O’Leary, the fast-talking, outspoken boss of Ryanair, has had his wings clipped — he says he is finally listening to his customers
By Lynn Barber
The most expensive thing he’s wearing is probably his glasses — £60 from Specsavers (Paul Stuart)
Michael O'Leary maintains that there is no such thing as bad publicity because all publicity serves to hammer home the message that Ryanair is cheap, which is good for bookings. So let me say at once that Ryanair is cheap. Cheap cheap cheap. And, of course, nasty. Famously nasty.
O’Leary claims that Ryanair does have some happy customers (especially in Poland), but I’ve never met them, whereas I’ve met a lot of people who say they will fly any airline except Ryanair. My colleague Rod Liddle summed it up the other week when he said that he can always console himself, while standing in a mile-long easyJet queue at Stansted, by looking across at the Ryanair queue and thinking: “Hell, I may have sunk low, but I haven’t sunk that low.”
O’Leary has for years gone out of his way to let his customers know he despises them. His attitude has always been: you want cheap, we’ll show you cheap! We’ll charge you for luggage and make you queue at the gate for hours and we’ll give you non-reclining seats and constant on-board announcements so that you can’t sleep, because if you sleep you won’t be buying all the outrageously overpriced drinks and snacks and knick-knacks and scratchcards we plan to sell you. We’ll dump you at obscure airports miles from anywhere with no transport into town and, of course, we’ll fine you £70 if you fail to print out your boarding card.
By unhappy chance, I had to print out my boarding card for a Ryanair flight to Frankfurt-Hahn (70 miles from Frankfurt) the other day and it took me a whole morning and reduced me to tears. It was not just difficult, it was fiendishly difficult and obviously designed to be so. Oddly enough, just at the moment that I was deciding O’Leary must be the devil incarnate, he was announcing that he had undergone a Pauline conversion. He has decided to become lovable. He is going to stop punishing passengers and show that he cares. He is going to give them allocated seating — well, not quite give, let’s not go mad, but only charge £10 so they don’t have to queue at the gate; and he will only charge them £15 if they lose their boarding card.
He was clearly trying to be charming when I met him. Talking to me he only once used a rude word and then spelt it out — 'S.H.I.T.' — to spare my delicate ears
He has been running around the media for weeks offering this new line and, so far, it seems to have worked. Yet still he can’t stem the flow of Ryanair horror stories. In December, one Italy-bound passenger who complained about a £4.20 cheese-and-cracker snack was told by a flight attendant that the price allowed people like him to get cheap flights — then the attendant added several “F*** you”s for good measure.
I was interested to see how the charm offensive might work, so I went to meet O’Leary in the bowels of a charmless hotel in the City and caught the end of a television interview he was giving to CNBC, about Ryanair’s wonderful new routes, fares, passenger numbers, et al. He used the word “cheap” in every other sentence, but he really didn’t need to because he looked so cheap — Gap shirt, jeans, rubbish watch, nondescript jacket.
Later, I asked what was the most expensive thing he was wearing and he said probably his glasses — £60 from Specsavers. He is worth at least £80m but really, really hates spending money. Yet he was clearly trying to be charming when I met him. Until this sea change he was famous for effing and blinding, but talking to me he only once used a rude word and then spelt it out — “S.H.I.T.” — to spare my delicate ears. I might have thought this man has been seriously misjudged.Except, of course, that I still had vivid memories of trying to print my Ryanair boarding card. I told him about it and he breezed: “Yes, but go back and try it now. We did have a fiendishly messy and complicated website, but we relaunched it.
“What we did wrong was, up until recently, if you were trying to print off your boarding card, it was all, ‘Do you want car insurance? No. Are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure? Life insurance? Are you sure?’ We were putting all these obstacles in the way of passengers.” Well, yes. He says it as though it’s only just struck him, but in fact the website has been terrible ever since it started (not least because O’Leary hired a 17-year-old schoolboy to design it and beat him down on price), so why has it taken him all this time to do anything about it?
“The difficulty, I think, up till about a year ago, was that nobody else’s website was any better. I think I’ve been asleep at the wheel. In the last 12 months, competitors have significantly improved their websites and really focused on making it easier for people to use, and we’ve been blithely going, ‘Ach, doesn’t matter, we’ve much cheaper fares than BA or easyJet, people will put up with it.’ But that’s not good enough any more. We don’t want people to have to put up with it, we want them to have a much nicer, pleasanter experience dealing with us. We had to learn from my mistakes. And the great thing is, I’m generating so much free publicity from this Damascene conversion! You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
True. But I didn’t say I believed it. It’s just another way of taking his passengers for mugs, waving a magic wand and saying now he loves them, having hated them all these years. What it’s really all about is that Ryanair had to issue a profit warning in September, because its ever onwards and upwards expansion seems to have stalled. O’Leary airily dismisses this idea: “I hate to tell you that’s a media invention. Our profit warning was only that we said this year our profit was going to be €520m after tax, instead of €570m. So we’ll make only half a billion after tax, when most other airlines in the world are losing money hand over fist. In actual fact, if you look at this year’s growth, we grew from 79m passengers last year to 81m this year — we’re going like gangbusters!”
So why are profits down? “Because fares will be lower this winter. Which is great! We’re selling more seats at lower fares. Why? Because the market’s a bit soft this winter. But that’s great because when prices get soft, the airline with the lowest cost, which is Ryanair, makes more money ultimately and we can drive more competitors out of the way. I’m the second- or third-largest shareholder and I don’t actually care about the short-term profits or the short-term share price. I care much more about whether we can actually grow this business and take it to 100m or even 110m passengers over the next five years by lowering air fares.”
Michael O'Leary maintains that there is no such thing as bad publicity because all publicity serves to hammer home the message that Ryanair is cheap, which is good for bookings. So let me say at once that Ryanair is cheap. Cheap cheap cheap. And, of course, nasty. Famously nasty.
O’Leary claims that Ryanair does have some happy customers (especially in Poland), but I’ve never met them, whereas I’ve met a lot of people who say they will fly any airline except Ryanair. My colleague Rod Liddle summed it up the other week when he said that he can always console himself, while standing in a mile-long easyJet queue at Stansted, by looking across at the Ryanair queue and thinking: “Hell, I may have sunk low, but I haven’t sunk that low.”
O’Leary has for years gone out of his way to let his customers know he despises them. His attitude has always been: you want cheap, we’ll show you cheap! We’ll charge you for luggage and make you queue at the gate for hours and we’ll give you non-reclining seats and constant on-board announcements so that you can’t sleep, because if you sleep you won’t be buying all the outrageously overpriced drinks and snacks and knick-knacks and scratchcards we plan to sell you. We’ll dump you at obscure airports miles from anywhere with no transport into town and, of course, we’ll fine you £70 if you fail to print out your boarding card.
By unhappy chance, I had to print out my boarding card for a Ryanair flight to Frankfurt-Hahn (70 miles from Frankfurt) the other day and it took me a whole morning and reduced me to tears. It was not just difficult, it was fiendishly difficult and obviously designed to be so. Oddly enough, just at the moment that I was deciding O’Leary must be the devil incarnate, he was announcing that he had undergone a Pauline conversion. He has decided to become lovable. He is going to stop punishing passengers and show that he cares. He is going to give them allocated seating — well, not quite give, let’s not go mad, but only charge £10 so they don’t have to queue at the gate; and he will only charge them £15 if they lose their boarding card.
He was clearly trying to be charming when I met him. Talking to me he only once used a rude word and then spelt it out — 'S.H.I.T.' — to spare my delicate ears
He has been running around the media for weeks offering this new line and, so far, it seems to have worked. Yet still he can’t stem the flow of Ryanair horror stories. In December, one Italy-bound passenger who complained about a £4.20 cheese-and-cracker snack was told by a flight attendant that the price allowed people like him to get cheap flights — then the attendant added several “F*** you”s for good measure.
I was interested to see how the charm offensive might work, so I went to meet O’Leary in the bowels of a charmless hotel in the City and caught the end of a television interview he was giving to CNBC, about Ryanair’s wonderful new routes, fares, passenger numbers, et al. He used the word “cheap” in every other sentence, but he really didn’t need to because he looked so cheap — Gap shirt, jeans, rubbish watch, nondescript jacket.
Later, I asked what was the most expensive thing he was wearing and he said probably his glasses — £60 from Specsavers. He is worth at least £80m but really, really hates spending money. Yet he was clearly trying to be charming when I met him. Until this sea change he was famous for effing and blinding, but talking to me he only once used a rude word and then spelt it out — “S.H.I.T.” — to spare my delicate ears. I might have thought this man has been seriously misjudged.Except, of course, that I still had vivid memories of trying to print my Ryanair boarding card. I told him about it and he breezed: “Yes, but go back and try it now. We did have a fiendishly messy and complicated website, but we relaunched it.
“What we did wrong was, up until recently, if you were trying to print off your boarding card, it was all, ‘Do you want car insurance? No. Are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure? Life insurance? Are you sure?’ We were putting all these obstacles in the way of passengers.” Well, yes. He says it as though it’s only just struck him, but in fact the website has been terrible ever since it started (not least because O’Leary hired a 17-year-old schoolboy to design it and beat him down on price), so why has it taken him all this time to do anything about it?
“The difficulty, I think, up till about a year ago, was that nobody else’s website was any better. I think I’ve been asleep at the wheel. In the last 12 months, competitors have significantly improved their websites and really focused on making it easier for people to use, and we’ve been blithely going, ‘Ach, doesn’t matter, we’ve much cheaper fares than BA or easyJet, people will put up with it.’ But that’s not good enough any more. We don’t want people to have to put up with it, we want them to have a much nicer, pleasanter experience dealing with us. We had to learn from my mistakes. And the great thing is, I’m generating so much free publicity from this Damascene conversion! You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
True. But I didn’t say I believed it. It’s just another way of taking his passengers for mugs, waving a magic wand and saying now he loves them, having hated them all these years. What it’s really all about is that Ryanair had to issue a profit warning in September, because its ever onwards and upwards expansion seems to have stalled. O’Leary airily dismisses this idea: “I hate to tell you that’s a media invention. Our profit warning was only that we said this year our profit was going to be €520m after tax, instead of €570m. So we’ll make only half a billion after tax, when most other airlines in the world are losing money hand over fist. In actual fact, if you look at this year’s growth, we grew from 79m passengers last year to 81m this year — we’re going like gangbusters!”
So why are profits down? “Because fares will be lower this winter. Which is great! We’re selling more seats at lower fares. Why? Because the market’s a bit soft this winter. But that’s great because when prices get soft, the airline with the lowest cost, which is Ryanair, makes more money ultimately and we can drive more competitors out of the way. I’m the second- or third-largest shareholder and I don’t actually care about the short-term profits or the short-term share price. I care much more about whether we can actually grow this business and take it to 100m or even 110m passengers over the next five years by lowering air fares.”
Air Travel Snobs (23 December 2013)
Here's a silly story I came across in the Guardian which is an ill-informed rant about Ryanair - a low budget airline that's always been good to me and I've travelled quite a bit in the past five years.
During that time I've only once been badly delayed flying with Ryanair - and that was due to a strike by air traffic controllers in France.
But I flew across the Atlantic twice last year with British Airways only to be delayed five hours each time - which was really, really irritating and inconvenient as well.
British Airways also got right up my nose when the airline jacked up the cost of flights from Canada a few of years ago - where I was stranded because of the fall out from the Icelandic volcano which grounded transatlantic flights for over 10 days..
And if you asked me to choose between the 'snooty' British Airways cabin staff and Michael O'Leary's team - I'd vote for Ryanair every time because the other lot are not remotely worth the extra money.
Less than livestock indeed, I wonder how much Natalie got paid to write this drivel because I suspect her real problem is that she is just another air travel snob.
Ryanair's profit warning: Flying is an exhausting business, made even worse by budget behaviour
By Natalie Haynes
Book with them, and know your money is going to a company that doesn’t even try to veil its contempt for its customers
Is there a bad-news story more likely to warm out hearts than Ryanair’s second profit warning in two months? It’s surely proof, if any were needed, that being made to feel less important than livestock is a streak of masochism too far, even for Britons. Airline competition in Europe has driven down prices at other airlines and passengers are voting with their feet (soon to be announced as the only body-part they don’t have to pay an additional fee to take on board a Ryanair plane).
Ryanair’s Chief Financial Officer, Howard Millar, blames the poor numbers on the fact that passengers are only booking discount fares, which comes as a surprise to me, since I thought that was the only kind Ryanair offered. Hasn’t their business model always been to offer 1p flights, plus fees for having hand luggage, hold luggage, the desire for a seat, oxygen requirements and any self-esteem whatsoever? Total cost of flight: £200. Or you could just pay £200 to another carrier, and not be made to feel that a plane crash somewhere over the Irish Sea would be a blessed release.
Nothing has democritised air travel more than low-cost flights. In my childhood, the idea of flying off on holiday seemed impossibly luxurious. Maybe Joan Collins would do it, in between episodes of Dynasty, but not real people. But for all the virtues of cheap flights, one of the problems is that they have lulled us into thinking that flying is a practical, fun way to travel.
One of the arguments for HS2 is that people would use it instead of flying between London and Manchester, which honestly seems to me a less sensible mode of transport between those two locations than walking. Why would anyone ever choose to fly a distance that you can cover in 140 minutes by train? Even if you aren’t afraid of flying, the hassle of getting to an airport, going through security, hiking to your gate, discovering it’s a bit windy so the planes are grounded, wishing you were dead, correcting yourself and wishing everyone else was dead: it’s an exhausting business. And that’s before you land in a field somewhere and pay the same price as a Manchester-London train ticket to get from the airport to actual London.
Fly Ryanair, and in addition to the irritation of printing out your own boarding pass (which will be covered in pictures that gobble ink, for no reason except the obvious – Michael O’Leary must have some kind of printer-cartridge business on the side) you also do it knowing that your money is going to a company that doesn’t even try to veil its contempt for its customers. We may blanch at the all-American “Have a nice day”, but even fake civility is something.
The one revenue category where Ryanair is flourishing is onboard spending. Say what you like about air travel: nothing dulls the pain of it like neat gin (except two more gins), and that is something Ryanair’s passengers understand perfectly well.
Ryanair’s Chief Financial Officer, Howard Millar, blames the poor numbers on the fact that passengers are only booking discount fares, which comes as a surprise to me, since I thought that was the only kind Ryanair offered. Hasn’t their business model always been to offer 1p flights, plus fees for having hand luggage, hold luggage, the desire for a seat, oxygen requirements and any self-esteem whatsoever? Total cost of flight: £200. Or you could just pay £200 to another carrier, and not be made to feel that a plane crash somewhere over the Irish Sea would be a blessed release.
Nothing has democritised air travel more than low-cost flights. In my childhood, the idea of flying off on holiday seemed impossibly luxurious. Maybe Joan Collins would do it, in between episodes of Dynasty, but not real people. But for all the virtues of cheap flights, one of the problems is that they have lulled us into thinking that flying is a practical, fun way to travel.
One of the arguments for HS2 is that people would use it instead of flying between London and Manchester, which honestly seems to me a less sensible mode of transport between those two locations than walking. Why would anyone ever choose to fly a distance that you can cover in 140 minutes by train? Even if you aren’t afraid of flying, the hassle of getting to an airport, going through security, hiking to your gate, discovering it’s a bit windy so the planes are grounded, wishing you were dead, correcting yourself and wishing everyone else was dead: it’s an exhausting business. And that’s before you land in a field somewhere and pay the same price as a Manchester-London train ticket to get from the airport to actual London.
Fly Ryanair, and in addition to the irritation of printing out your own boarding pass (which will be covered in pictures that gobble ink, for no reason except the obvious – Michael O’Leary must have some kind of printer-cartridge business on the side) you also do it knowing that your money is going to a company that doesn’t even try to veil its contempt for its customers. We may blanch at the all-American “Have a nice day”, but even fake civility is something.
The one revenue category where Ryanair is flourishing is onboard spending. Say what you like about air travel: nothing dulls the pain of it like neat gin (except two more gins), and that is something Ryanair’s passengers understand perfectly well.
