The truth about Ryanair

rogercod

I have flown Ryanair to Tampere in Finland quite a few times. Flight times are not very user friendly but at the price can we really complain? By the way has anybody ever managed to get a reply from the customer service department? I'm still waiting from last october

mclaren_2

ive traveled with ryanair when i was going to london last year and it was a good flight.... i have no complaints.... ppl complain about easyjet, BA, Virgin, and loads more..... cant keep everybody happy

WiseInvestor_2

ynot2005 wrote:

silly snobbery..aint that right wise investor

Perhaps my posts have been unclear. Cabin crew are a legal requirement to safeguard the lives of the passengers - the fact they also serve food/drink is somewhat lower on their list of responsibilities. The same rules apply to all airlines, which are neither silly or snobbish.

Personally, I would never fly with an airline who's crew were too tired or linguistically unable to communicate to a plane load of screaming passengers - not even if it was a bargain!

Post-It-Note_3

Ryanair are the only company who charge their staff to work for them. I kid you not over £1000 to be trained as cabin crew!! but for alot of wanabee cabin crew Ryanir is the easiest job to get.https://www.cabincrew.com has loads of views on the whole ryanair debate .i personally have flown with them no end of times and luckily have had no problems. I myself have looked into a career with ryanair and the rotas are shocking so dont blame the crew blame the boss!

Edna_Bucket_2

...and talking of the boss - an extract courtesy of:

http://www.oxygen.ie/books/books_ryanair.php3

which itself draws from Siobhan Creaton's book "Ryanair: How a Small Irish Airline Conquered Europe."

...as time passed, and Ryanair became phenomenally succesful, O'Leary became more confident and brash and outspoken. He lost his tie and found rumpled rugby shirts. Now he is like a WWE bad guy, revelling in the catcalls and boos from the crowd, but who knows that secretly we all love and admire him for his madness and badness.

His aggressive management style involves lots of shouting and banging things, and he regularly unloads cuss words and insult laden barrages on lower management types to 'motivate' them to work harder and better. He tells complaining customers to f**k off, calls his rivals w**kers, refuses to listen to unions, called the EU an 'evil empire' and generally stomps around saying 'Are you startin are ye?' to anyone nearby. He is not everyone's cup of tea...

...O'Leary has done rather well for himself out of all this. In 1989 when Ryanair was on the verge of going bust, he negotiated a contract giving him 25% of all profits over £2m. Seeing as the company was losing millions a year, and looked unlikely to ever become profitable, this didn't seem like much of a risk to the owners. However given the incredible success of the last fifteen years, O'Leary is now worth maybe more than 500 milllion euro.

scheming_gypsy

WiseInvestor wrote:

Perhaps my posts have been unclear. Cabin crew are a legal requirement to safeguard the lives of the passengers - the fact they also serve food/drink is somewhat lower on their list of responsibilities. The same rules apply to all airlines, which are neither silly or snobbish.

Personally, I would never fly with an airline who's crew were too tired or linguistically unable to communicate to a plane load of screaming passengers - not even if it was a bargain!

To be honest when i came back from Spain there were 3 cabin crew, 2 English and 1 Spanish and i understood the Spanish lad better than the 2 Scouse girls.

Although it's a legal requirement to safeguard the passengers the serving food and drink is pretty much all they're there for in the accident to beverage service ration.

Edna_Bucket_2

More Michael O'Leary "gems":

On the 9% cut that travel agents used to take:

"Screw the travel agent,"..."Take the f**kers out and shoot them. What have they done for passengers over the years?"

On Ryanair's strict no-refund policy:

"We don't fall all over ourselves if they... say my granny fell ill. What part of no refund don't you understand? You are not getting a refund so f**k off."

On Jurgen Weber, Lufthansa CEO:

"Weber says Germans don't like low fares. How the f**k does he know? He's never offered them any. The Germans will crawl b*ll*ck-naked over broken glass to get them."

On competition between BA and Ryanair:

"There is too much: 'we really admire our competitors'. All b*ll*cks. Everyone wants to kick the sh*t out of everyone else. We want to beat the cr*p out of BA. They mean to kick the cr*p out of us."

...and of course on himself:

"I see myself as a jumped-up Paddy running a good airline that gives great fares and scr*ws British Airways."

scheming_gypsy

sounds like me

Fraserca

I followed Post-It-Notes suggestion and looked at the cabin crew message board. The Ryanair comments makes shocking reading.

Paying for uniform I had heard of, £1500 for training and no pay while training - surprising that people will do it. But the catalogue of personal and human abuses makes me resolve never to fly again with them. Its modern day slavery - great for those that brown nose and are lucky - too bad if you take a day off with illness or your gran dies.

Fact is that they keep recruiting more staff only to sack them in their hundreds - all in the name of low fares. In reality the cost is not in money but in damaged lives - especially those who try to believe in and be loyal - only to be discarded.

See http://www.cabincrew.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=9759&PN=1

and other threads in that message board

ynot2005

re wise investor

the lingustic capability i have noticed on ryanair flights is very impressive..the foreign cabin crew who speak english very well leave me feeling that my own efforts on learning spanish and french fall a long way short of their ability

surely there would be more problems if the cabin crew were all british...and half the passengers could not understand them in an emergency

i have had no doubts on saftey issues before with bargain flights....ryanair miserable staff is without doubt a fact...but saftey problems...i dont think so

the real saftey issues are air traffic control problems...now that is scary!