How much you enjoyed this offering from Channel 5 (Ryanair: Britain’s Most Hated Airline? – you pay extra for the question mark) will, I suspect, correlate closely with how much you have travelled on Ryanair. I have never had the … well, we’ll use the word “pleasure” for now … of travelling on this or any other airline (on the grounds that humans – and I really can’t stress this enough – shouldn’t be flying in anything other than the occasional childhood dream). So I thoroughly enjoyed this anatomisation of the no-frills Irish airline, which seemed to exist for no grander purpose – and why should it? – than to boggle at the man who, in essence, created it: Michael O’Leary.
What a piece of work is man. Particularly this man. For he is the one who looked at the airline that began as a relatively conventional one in 1985. It flew from places you had heard of to other places you had heard of and offered food, drink, plentiful access to toilets and all the other niceties of life for a reasonable price – and ran at a loss to do so. Then it said: “No. Take away everything but the seats and the pilot. And let me think about the seats. And the pilots.”
It revolutionised the industry. People who had once saved all year to go on an annual foreign holiday were, by the end of the 90s, seasoned travellers. If you wanted to get from A to B (or a few kilometres outside B and then a coach) for the lowest possible price, O’Leary was your guy. And if he was occasionally a guy who seemed to have the same whiff of contempt for customers as the criminal does for his docile marks, well – it was only a couple of tenners from Dublin to Stuttgart-adjacent, so what did it matter?
If you want anything more than your seat, of course, you have to pay extra. O’Leary has always been very – one could almost say monstrously – clear about that. That coach from beyond point B, for example. Your baggage. Food. Drink. At one point, he even tried to take out the seats and have a standing-room-only fare. Tales of appalling rudeness to those who dared complain abounded. One woman, who was charged €300 for Ryanair to print out the boarding pass she had forgotten, was told to forget about a refund. The general tone, and possibly even a direct quote from his email, was that “it was your fuck-up”, she said.
His staff were treated no better than his passengers. O’Leary refused until very recently to have any truck with unions. To encourage quick turnarounds between flights, attendants were only paid for time in the air. They had sales targets to meet for everything that could possibly be loaded on to a trolley and pushed down the aisle.
As the tales of horror mounted up, however, you realised that his real genius lay in stripping out the inefficiencies caused by modern customer relations. The degree of effrontery required in capitalism has traditionally been mitigated by PR flimflam, cant, the smoke-and-mirrors of unswervingly polite, on-message staff and an unyielding pretence by those at the top that everything is done by Them in the holistic service of Us. We hope this is so, and they continue to humour us after their commercial stratagems have been successful by not rubbing our noses in the fact that we have just been ruthlessly exploited, in order to maximise their exploitation chances next time round too.
It works, but it is not perfectly efficient; you do have to give the customers a little something to keep the wheels of illusion oiled. If you don’t bother with the illusion, you get to keep everything.
This worked seamlessly for O’Leary and – bar a slight hiccup last year when particularly bad press and his hated pilots getting their unions recognised combined to affect share price – looks like it will go on working pretty well for the foreseeable future.
Despite all this, Ryanair remains a €1bn business, flying 140 million people a year almost to their destinations, with the capacity to fly another 60 million if and when it wants to and enough sadomasochists decide that they do, too. Price wins in the end.
