Why does RyanAir continue to be popular?

Mr_Wang

jpsartre wrote: »

I think that's an underrated advantage of the LCC's. For many passengers, when the choice is between a non-stop flight from the regions or a flight with a stop-over in London or some other hub, they'll go for the former option, even if the total price is comparable.

What gets me though, is how people compare Ryanair with BA et al.

Ive had sh*ts that have lasted longer than European flights, who really cares whats painted on the outside of the plane, its just a seat, in a tin can, in the air.
Cost is key, location is key, anyone who looks beyond that for a couple of hours flight that is on a MSE site probably has that reason to blame.

booler

They are not "popular". They are cheap.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN9VcCzMSqg

Mr_Wang wrote: »

Ive had sh*ts that have lasted longer than European flights

If I were you I would not be messing about on forums. I would be seeing a doctor as a matter of urgency.

Bob_the_Saver

Mr_Wang wrote: »

Ive had sh*ts that have lasted longer than European flights

You hadn't just been to Singh's Chicken restaurant in Chandigarh had you by any chance? Near the bus stand.

Mr_Wang

Bob_the_Saver wrote: »

You hadn't just been to Singh's Chicken restaurant in Chandigarh had you by any chance? Near the bus stand.

As it happens Ive been to several restaurants in Chandigarh - All of which could justify my previous statement

2sides2everystory

The part of this thread that isn't about bowel movements raises a rather good picture of the way we in the UK have become ultra-well connected into Europe by Ryanair's offerings and how Ryanair may have changed our lives in more ways than we imagine. First, maybe there is some merit in comparing Ryanair with the airline that at one time seemed to be their biggest competitor - Easyjet ...

IIRC, (and I have not researched this just spouting it off the top of my head so it could be terribly wrong!) Sir Stelios' Easyjet was the first conspicuous lo-cost airline available to us. By that I mean they were the ones who spent big money up front on promoting the concept of independently bookable low fares for European Travel. Their name told us what they were trying to do. Sir Stelios' seems to come from very moneyed Greek Cypriot stock, possibly a shipping family. His family name we were sold originally as Ioannou if 'Stelios' wasn't enough - thesedays more often we see he uses Haji-Ioannou and one imagines he must have been dabbling in aviation and the travel business as a young man exploiting some family interest or perhaps simply as a rich man's play area.

I had always wondered if there was any connection between Stelios and another Greek Cypriot family named Asprou. There had been a relatively small airline owned by "Aspro Travel" based somewhere like Cardiff I think for some years in the late 80s early 90s which got swallowed up by Airtours eventually and as with many stories in aviation businesses which don't quite find their holy grail, there was some bitter aftertaste (again IIRC).

Anyway, I digress. Easyjet started in 1995 when Stelios was just 28 and ex. LSE I think like our birthday-boy MSE Martin.

Stelios was of course the figurehead of Easyjet and the suggestion was that it was all his own work, but like all of these sudden massive start-up appearances on the landscape, you have to question where the money came from to play with an idea like that? The airline business to that point, and maybe even now was always said to be the traditional industry where players invest a large fortune and walk away with a smaller one! Did Ryanair just get lucky with some new ideas about aircraft finance or was there some interesting and massive cash injection down the line?

Anyway, when EZY launched, they were competing directly against package holiday companies who controlled a large part of the seasonal traffic so much so that many had set up their own airlines e.g. Thomson and Thomas Cook and airlines like BA and Monarch relied heavily upon package companies for a chunk of their traffic too.

Lo-cost didn't just take business from the traditional set ups but it also broke much new ground by giving us the opportunity to use aircraft like trains and buses for everyday travel. No package necessary. Indeed we were encouraged to cut out the middleman travel agent.

Easyjet however seemed still to shackle themselves in the main by the concept that they needed to fly to the same old destinations i.e. yer Palma Majorcas, yer Malagas, yer Tenerifes ...

Ryanair didn't just do that ... sure they didn't deny themselves those particular routes but they quickly spotted that with the dropping of the Iron Curtain i.e. the end of the Cold War that there were hundreds of underutilised but very serviceable military and ex military 10,000 foot runways all over Europe. In the UK the best uses for those that anyone could think of until Ryanair showed us some much more lateral thinking was as Sunday and Bank Holiday Market sites with big car parks! Ryanair also got their head round a business model which O'Leary famously described as "not the business of selling tickets to passengers, but the business of selling passengers to airports".

Ryanair has of course been around for donkey's years as a relatively small Irish outfit run as a sideline to the late Tony Ryan's business interests, but it only really got its act together about 15 years ago when it actually realised the importance of the internet way ahead of most businesses. I don't know if O'Leary had anything to do with the internet angle originally or whether as a particularly able bean-counter and big finance manipulator he was just the first to recognise how the numbers were stacking up. He cut his aviation teeth in a massive behind the scenes outfit named GPA Finance or similar. Guinness Peat Aviation was where the GPA came from. They leased airliners to airlines. Clearly O'Leary learned a trick or two about how to finance lots of shiney new Boeings! They now have over 300 exact same type. Ten years ago they still had a few dog-eared 737-200s amongst a fleet of about 75 aircraft I think (again unresearched). They soon realised that shiney and new was better than dog-eared and probably much easier for them to plan operations when they only had one type to consider.

Once the patterns began to emerge, and with the world airliner sales business dented by 9/11, O'Leary did some stonking deals with Boeing for a rash of new aircraft and options on dozens more.

We tend to take the internet for granted now, but what we tend to forget is that already by the end of the last millennium, Ryanair had already come up with an almost bombproof booking engine whereas all the other airlines including Easyjet had not got it right at all.

That meant IIRC, Ryanair were rightly proud to announce as long as 12 years ago that over 90% of their bookings were internet bookings. I think even they were surprised with the success of that booking engine. A magic formula was emerging. What is most surprising however is that even now, other airlines still have not quite got booking engines as intuitive, forgiving and as easy to negotiate as Ryanair's. I remember it because I was dabbling in website technology myself at the time.

A dozen years further on, it seems contrary to say what I am about to say against all the recent bad publicity they subsequently attracted for not being upfront with prices, but key I think was that Ryanair made it very easy to get straight to the flight on the date and the price (even if that price eventually became a bit bait and switch!) within very few clicks.

Also their website has never been up itself in terms of "Before we proceed first tell us whether you are in the UK and what your inside leg measurement is and whether you are one of our Executive Club members or a travel agent". It certainly was never heavy on fancy background pictures or heavyweight "professional" business brochure style and neither did you have to wait for those annoying old style calendar pop ups to load or to wade through several pages only to find there was no flight.

In black and white with a bit of basic blue and yellow, Ryanair dangled your flight in front of your nose immediately you chose one of their routes.

Even now the likes of BA don't really get it and still rather arrogantly present themselves as a cure-all / "of course we fly everywhere you suits need to go just like we always did" type thing. They are not and in fact never have been. Look at how they thought they could regain some ground by launching the Go airline which got swallowed by EZY and also how KLM launched something beginning with W which was swallowed by RYR. No, instead, big airlines like BA and KLM have had to slim down their cost bases to make themselves generally more low cost to compete. Efficient businessmen fly round Europe on low cost routes now.

As Ryanair's business became more mature, like their attitude to publicity, their attitude to unashamedly bunging in extra pages for car hire, hostel bookings and even bingo cards, even if it annoyed customers, became more daring and even reckless. Ryanair soon knew and still know that the inertia of their main message was already implanted in our consciousness so yes they might turn us off a bit with their ways, but most of us just wouldn't walk away and never come back. We just couldn't do that without denying ourselves a freedom to travel at low cost. So they really do experiment with us. They know they have an enormous and representative audience now. They manipulate that audience easily. I would love to have access to their databases. I have long said they treat us like Pavlov's dog. Sometimes they kill us with their crazy ideas, sometimes they get lucky and break more of the existing aviation industry moulds we all thought were sacrosanct.

The fact is that between 0800 and 2200 most days of the year there are constantly around a 100 or more Ryanair aircraft actually in the air somewhere over Europe. Right now I can see there are at least 88. When I started this post an hour ago there were 126. How do I know? Got to flightradar24.com, zoom out so you can see all Europe and apply a Callsign filter RYR for Ryanair.

It is a very useful website for following family members' flights whilst they travel, or discovering where your incoming aircraft actually is when you are concerned about delays. Or for a post-mortem perhaps as a prelim for a delay compensation claim after the event, you can discover right down to the individual aircraft registration which aircraft was actually where for the last 3 weeks or so I think.

So Ryanair are now the biggest airline in Europe flying to the most destinations. They are perhaps more responsible than any other airline for changing the way flight and cabin crews are trained and employed and remunerated. They are more responsible than any other airline for the ease of inter-European migration, having negated the need for whole families from Eastern Europe for example to up sticks and actually leave their home countries permanently to come here for work. Hundreds of thousands of them now travel back and forth constantly to their original homes using Ryanair. Something I find slightly worrying but thousands perhaps wouldn't, is the number of travelling migrant women of non-European origin who seem to travelling as regularly as I do with countless young children and the numbers of apparent families who seem to get on like a house on fire on the plane but mysteriously become independent unassociated individual travellers under the security cameras at each end. Many individuals now have multiple passports and it is interesting sometimes to perhaps see ahead of you in the queue one passport presented to airport staff at a gate and for it to be put away round the next corner and possibly a different one presented to immigration authorities. There are few standard procedures even between EU airports on this kind of checking. You can board a flight at Stansted without showing your passport to any rigorous checker - it is sometimes just a grubby Swissport baggage team leader in boots and overalls just trying to get the flight away on time. You only show your boarding pass to get as far as the gate. It could be anyone's boarding pass and it could be one of several you might be carrying if you were up to no good.

Ryanair are probably more responsible than any other airline for the ease of people trafficking for the sex industry - yes now that is a further wild leap of imagination and generalisation I know, but if you travel regularly with Ryanair, just think about it. Ryanair's exploitation of young impressionable female cabin crew for their charity calendars is very close to the same mark as other less savoury exploitations occurring daily.

How much checking of anything other than the size of your handbaggage actually goes on on Ryanair routes?

Ryanair are a massive feature of our landscape and I do not just mean the European aviation landscape. Their influence extends to changing the way hundreds of thousands of people live. Many of us started small with self-booking short haul in Europe. Ryanair more than any of the others are probably responsible for expanding the longer haul businesses of other airlines by encouraging hundreds of thousands of brand new regular globetrotters who started small like me and got confident that we could tackle something more heavyweight with other airlines too. Which perhaps has a little to do with why Bob the Saver and Mr. Wang know the same restaurants in Chandigarh

Some of us fly so often now that we may well be exposing ourselves not just to unexpected bowel problems, but to some of the other exact same illnesses once suffered only by flightcrews - premature ageing of the skin for example - frequent exposure to higher levels of cosmic radiation up at 38000 feet or more.

Sorry about the big post, but I think it is a very big and philosophical subject and thanks to the OP for raising it.

callum9999

What a ridiculous post! Other than trying to blame Ryanair for the sex trade (!?) and letting those pesky immigrants in ( judging by the way you talk about them, no doubt to "steal our jobs and benefits"...), is there a point to it?

I also find it particularly disturbing that you appear to be tracking " non-European migrant women" through the airport, keeping tabs on who they interact with and analyzing who is using what passport when... Seriously creepy behaviour... Do you have some sort of prejudice against foreigners?

2sides2everystory

callum9999 wrote: »

What a ridiculous post! Other than trying to blame Ryanair for the sex trade (!?) and letting those pesky immigrants in ( judging by the way you talk about them, no doubt to "steal our jobs and benefits"...), is there a point to it?

I also find it particularly disturbing that you appear to be tracking " non-European migrant women" through the airport, keeping tabs on who they interact with and analyzing who is using what passport when... Seriously creepy behaviour... Do you have some sort of prejudice against foreigners?

Callum will you ever grow up? I mean seriously. You really do post like some problem child sometimes.

I am interested in how Europe is changing and how the world is changing. I call it how I see it. I am not politically correct. I commentate. I observe. You might begin to learn something about the world in which you live if you start thinking independently instead of reacting like an incompletely educated erk of the world.

I watch what goes on in airports because I am security conscious and I know some of the weaknesses. If you mark yourself out as of blatantly non-European origin by the way you dress you get noticed, especially in an airport. For example at Stansted, Swissport baggage police/staff notice you and my view is that you are more likely to be targeted for a bag check because you are seen as vulnerable to their procedure for tapping you for an extra 60 quid. I lately have also seen Swissport staff taking women of non-European origin out of the gate queue and around the corner behind the stairs to ask them to raise their hijab for their passport check. You can't help notice such things as that and ask yourself "is it right?" and "Why is it necessary?" And if someone in front of you stops abruptly after you have just passed through the gate and dodges behind a pillar and puts their passport away and pulls out another one before they present to immigration then what's that about? It's odd. So is being part of an apparent family and sat next to them on a plane chatting animatedly and then when it is time to get off behaving like you are travelling separately and ignoring those you have been with at the other end walking some distance apart.

Yes I dared talk about sex-trafficking. It is rife and it is largely as a result of the ease of migration by air travel especially from Eastern Europe. Ryanair is the biggest player in people moving whether they be trafficked or not. My deductions are logical.

By all means call me creepy and ridiculous if you have nothing better to post after you see someone like me write words about migrant women and sex-trafficking, but I strongly suggest you quickly get a life of your own instead of going off half-cocked on many of my posts. You have been told a number of times by others who know a bit about air travel that you frequently post out of the back of your hat. Don't you think you might ask yourself if you might not actually yet know which way is up on many aspects?

I am old in the tooth so I have learned a lot and am still learning. You don't seem to learn.

callum9999

2sides2everystory wrote: »

Callum will you ever grow up? I mean seriously. You really do post like some problem child sometimes.

I am interested in how Europe is changing and how the world is changing. I call it how I see it. I am not politically correct. I commentate. I observe. You might begin to learn something about the world in which you live if you start thinking independently instead of reacting like an incompletely educated erk of the world.

I watch what goes on in airports because I am security conscious and I know some of the weaknesses. If you mark yourself out as of blatantly non-European origin by the way you dress you get noticed, especially in an airport. For example at Stansted, Swissport baggage staff notice you and my view is that you are more likely to be targeted for a bag check because you are seen as vulnerable to it. I lately have also seen Swissport staff for example taking women of non-European origin out of the gate queue and around the corner behind the stairs to ask them to raise their hijab for their passport check. You can't help notice such things as that. And if someone in front of you stops and dodges behind a pillar and puts their passport away and pulls out another one before they present to immigration then what's that about? It's odd. So is being part of a family and sat next to them on a plane chatting animatedly and then when it is time to get off behaving like you are travelling separately and ignoring those you have been with at the other end.

Yes I dared talk about sex-trafficking. It is rife and it is largely as a result of the ease of migration by air travel especially from Eastern Europe. Ryanair is the biggest player in people moving whether they be trafficked or not. My deductions are logical.

By all means call me creepy and ridiculous if you have nothing better to post after you see someone like me write words about migrant women and sex-trafficking, but I strongly suggest you quickly get a life of your own instead of going off half-cocked on many of my posts. You have been told a number of times by others who know a bit about air travel that you frequently post out of the back of your hat. Don't you think you might ask yourself if you might not actually yet know which way is up on many aspects?

I am old in the tooth so I have learned a lot and am still learning. You don't seem to learn.

What exactly have I been told then? The only things I post that people have disagreed with on here have been about consumer issues like credit card fees etc. I dont see how people who " know a bit about air travel" have any claim to have better opinions than me on such matters?

You also seem to be falling into the trap of thinking being old has given you more knowledge as opposed to more arrogance. How could you possibly know I "don't learn"? Now who's being childish... Especially as you yourself said several times that you're basically just making it up. The leap in logic that Ryanair is cheap ergo it encourages sex trafficking being one such example - what's wrong with driving or flying with a more expensive carrier? There is a lot of money in trafficking, they dont have to rely on the existence of Ryanair to do it.

schoolrunmum

Just for balance-we have a place in Majorca, and go there every July/Aug for a few weeks. I ALWAYS shop around when buying flights, and last year BA were far and away cheaper than EZY,and even Monarch and TUIfly. And I'm talking several hundreds of pounds cheaper, not pennies. SO, we booked BA, and a few days before departure we were offered an upgrade to Club Europe, again for a small amount. We took it, it was still cheaper than EZY to the tune of around £300.....
Now, Ryanair, I am retired ATC, my better half a retired BA skipper. We choose not to fly Ryanair, regardless of how cheap they are. We made the mistake once and it won't happen again.I question their safety-cabin crew that barely speak English? My husband watched the aircraft arrive, the crew did not leave the flight deck for a walkround..mandatory in BA-then we boarded and left. Don't even start me on the pilot recruitment and selection procedures...it's not about who is the best pilot, it's who has the fattest chequebook...they are in the vanguard of lowering standards in the industry, IMHO.

2sides2everystory

callum9999 wrote: »

... I dont see how people who " know a bit about air travel" have any claim to have better opinions than me on such matters?

Yes we can see you don't see it.

How could you possibly know I "don't learn"?

I observe, callum. I commentate.

... you yourself said several times that you're basically just making it up.

I don't think I said I was creating my theories from thin air, did I? I said I wasn't researching the history and you may have misunderstood the phrase "off the top of my head". That was not intended to mean it was a figment of imagination but that everything I wrote was indeed collated from my existing knowledge without resorting to Google. I just wanted to warn it might contain mistakes if I had recalled incorrectly.

The leap in logic that Ryanair is cheap ergo it encourages sex trafficking being one such example ...

I think you'll find that I made a case for your delectation out of far more than just price - or perhaps you didn't bother to read it all

There is a lot of money in trafficking, they dont have to rely on the existence of Ryanair to do it.

Yep you said it! I imagine people trafficking is like most nefarious businesses - there are several roles to be played and levels to observe. I am sure it isn't all about rich guys in blacked out Range Rovers putting themselves out personally to travel back and forth across Europe to collect select 12 year olds and to fly in Lufthansa business classs sat alongside their prey so they can't wander off independently. I imagine there are a lot of miserable Gofers themselves being exploited one way or the other and yes I am sure some catch the ferry!

How do you think it all works, Callum? What do you deduce about how we arrived at the unequal sorry state we observe daily where you are free to fly your way around Europe for very little cost if you manage to negotiate Gatwick without missing your flights yet some of the people you encounter on the way if you were bright enough to notice, may have much less savoury and/or less comfortable life stories to tell? The airline cabin crew who don't live in their home country (Spain?) who have to get up at some ungodly hour every day and catch an intercity bus from a bed sit or even shared room in a grotty part of town driven by a bus driver working with all the signs of broncitis who isn't living with his family in his home country (Poland?) either, and who speaks a different language to the ticket seller standing for hours in the cold at the busstop between buses, wrapped up to fend off the weather like some refugee out of Siberia, who is a university graduate but isn't in her home country (Italy?) either - all of them so-called economic migrants but really, other than the bus driver who, in a position of some higher responsibility somehow usually is older and more arrogant, is just a young person like you trying to get on in a seriously messed up western world economy which once worked so much better?

Do you think that Banksy picture up for auction in Florida tells a bigger story than a child at a sewing machine which we all might do well to think about? Are you wearing anything made by a kid on a sewing machine ? Are the kid and the sewing machine and even the kid's baseball cap visual metaphors for some much bigger message? When was the last time you wore a baseball cap? Longer ago than I did? Or do we both wear one of some kind every day thinking it's cool?

Ryanair is a dominant citizen doing well from changes in the European economy, many of which it helped to create and actively exploits against the interests of other citizens. From O'Leary's famous quote, they are even traffickers by their own admission.

I am sure schoolrunmum ex ATC has many more stories she could tell but the problem is that Ryanair is now dominant and the surviving competitors are of the mind "if we can't beat them we must join them in many ways".