Why not? It’ll send people using public transport again - he’ll be giddy with excitement I’d say
Having no balls is another one of your problems. You should really ask the Priest for those back bro.
I was on a flight a few weeks ago which i had to book at short notice and as a result to my considerable cost. I booked it the day before the flight and it cost about four times what it normally would. On the plane, there were probably a third of the seats vacant. I’m just wondering, if one was to turn up at the airport two hours before a flight would they get it at a real knockdown price if there were seats vacant? Surely it’s better to get arses on seats than leave them empty…
If you were looking to go to a specific location then no, they would screw you to the wall but if you were looking to say just go to a warm location for a holiday it could work in your favour.
Are Ryanair flights private transport?
Yes.
No.
You’re speaking scheidt bro
Anyway, the minister hated planes
I think we’ll need to hear from the man himself on this one.
Some really intelligent arguments above from Flano and Runt. Both articulating their points really well. Hard to know which side is right.
It’s the opposite to the left side.
Barrup!
Oh right. I mean left.
Flesh this out please.
If you take what’s on offer you’ll get it cheap, if you ask for what you want they’ll, as RTT put it, screw you to the wall.
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An O’Leary interview from the Guardian[/size][/font]
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The great French philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote: “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.” By that token, I suggest to Michael O’Leary[/url], he is one of the world’s most evil men, enticing millions of hitherto stay-at-home Brits and other Europeans to jet around their continent, befouling its air with [url=“http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/carbon-emissions”]carbon emissions and defacing its landscape with excrescent airports.[/size][/font]
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“For fuck’s sake,” says O’Leary. “For a start, the French have never produced a great philosopher. Great wine maybe, but no great philosophers. Ryanair[/url] is responsible for the integration of [url=“http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/europe-news”]Europe by bringing lots of different cultures to the beaches of Spain, Greece and Italy, where they couple and copulate in the interests of pan-European peace.”[/size][/font]
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That’s probably not how they see it down there, I say, pointing out the window towards the tent village of anticapitalist protesters around St Paul’s cathedral. To them, he’s just another capitalist chancer destroying the planet and imposing a bogus narrative on his profiteering. “We’re bringing cultures together!” counters O’Leary. “There hasn’t been a war in Europe for 50 years because they’re all too busy flying on Ryanair. I should get the Nobel peace prize – screw Bono.” Or perhaps he should stand for Ireland’s presidency next time round? “I don’t think I could get elected as Ireland’s ratcatcher.”[/size][/font]
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It’s 8.30am on Thursday and the boss of Europe’s most successful low-cost airline should perhaps already be thinking of switching to decaff. “Nothing destroys the environment like two world wars. The idea that we’re destroying the environment is nonsense. My cattle probably cause more carbon emissions than my fleet of aeroplanes.” One of Ireland’s richest men, O’Leary breeds Aberdeen Angus cattle and horses. He winks. “That’ll get Guardian readers going.”[/size][/font]
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Perhaps, but what’s more likely to get them going is the prospect of downloading porn on Ryanair flights. Last week, O’Leary announced his company’s recession-bucking results at a press conference.But what the assembled hacks reported was the fact that the man who charges passengers for checking luggage in and for inflight food was now going to charge them to watch inflight porn.[/size][/font]
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“I was asked what the next thing would be and I said, ‘Probably passengers paying for access to the internet. They’ll watch whatever’s on their tablets – gambling, racing, pornography.’ Next question: ‘Are you going to have porn on your flights?’ I said: ‘Of course, if that’s what’s on people’s tablets.’ And then somebody was wittering: ‘What about the child sitting next to you?’”[/size][/font]
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But they had a point, hadn’t they? After all, watching porn is one thing in the privacy of a hotel room, and quite another as you’re descending into Wrocław with a shameful grin and a five-year-old glimpsing your screen from across the aisle? “Oh, for the love of God!” says O’Leary. He’s unrepentant, not least because the resultant media frenzy, he reckons, caused a 25% spike on Ryanair’s website and a 10% rise in ticket sales. “It’s brilliant. The gobbier I get, the more cheap headlines I get, the more tickets we sell.” Is there any such thing as bad PR? “Only if it’s about safety. Otherwise, probably not.”[/size][/font]
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O’Leary is a past master at manufacturing headlines out of things that remain pie in the sky. No wonder he’s known by sceptical industry-watchers as Michael O’Really. A couple of years ago, he announced coin-operated inflight toilets, or “pay-per-pee”. He says: “I still want to do that, but it rests on a misperception to suggest we’d make money from charging for using toilets. We’d give that money to an incontinence charity.”[/size][/font]
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Instead, Ryanair would make its money, he claims, by stripping two out of three loos out of every plane, and installing six extra seats. He says that would lower all the fares on every flight by about 5%, making Ryanair more attractive – if only in price terms.“By getting rid of baggage check-in, we got people checking in on the website. We got rid of check-in desk rental charges, check-in staff, baggage-handling staff and lost bag departments – and we reduced ticket prices as a result”[/size][/font]
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At today’s press conference at the London Stock Exchange, O’Leary is to share a platform with people whom, as he puts it, he’s been “kicking the crap out of for years” – EasyJet’s Carolyn McCall, Virgin Atlantic’s Steve Ridgway and British Airways’ Willie Walsh. Surely, I say, this is when he stops being the punk outsider he’s posed as since becoming Ryanair’s CEO in 1994, and joins the fat-cat aviation mainstream? “I think you’d find it hard to find anyone who thinks I’ve joined the mainstream.”[/size][/font]
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These airline executives are putting aside their differences to call on the government to scrap the air passenger duty (APD). They claim it’s destroying the UK’s tourism industry. In 2009, passengers paid £1.9bn in APD and it’s set to rise to £3.6bn by 2015, particularly if – as they expect – George Osborne seeks more duty to plug the deficit in his autumn statement later this month.[/size][/font]
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But there is a counter-argument. Why not increase APD even more, perhaps even prohibitively, to reduce air traffic and encourage Britons to stay at home rather than spending their holiday money abroad? It’s an economic and environmental win-win, surely? “That’s horseshit. It’s not about Britons. It’s about visitor numbers being down 20% over the past five years, while in continental Europe they’re up.”[/size][/font]
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“Brits are taxing themselves out of the tourism industry. Tourism is a great way of generating entry-level jobs. Everybody’s first job was in a hotel, a bar, a restaurant. These jobs have been devastated in recent years by this stupid tax on UK visitors. No wonder there’s so much youth unemployment in Britain. We need Tory toffs to scrap this bloody stupid tax – they’d make far more out of the increased money the visitors spent if they did than they get from APD.”[/size][/font]
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After the press conference I join O’Leary on the Gatwick Express from London Victoria as he heads home. His business is booming, with new flights landing at new airports. (His scouts have found another one notionally near Warsaw, for instance, to which Ryanair’s passengers will fly next year, for much less than the £30.80 day return for this rail journey.) This winter Ryanair will buy 30 new planes, and another 20 next year. He aims to increase passenger numbers from 75 to 85 million over the next two years. Is he recession-proof? “That’s too strong a word. But low-cost travel doesn’t follow economic trends. It continues to grow so long as we lower the cost. In recession, the Ikeas, Lidls and Aldis and the discount airlines do well.”[/size][/font]
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Won’t the Eurozone crisis harm business? “Depends what happens. If Greece goes back to the drachma, that’ll probably cause a boom in tourism, because property prices will collapse. That would be good for us in the short term. We’d probably increase our flight numbers. Whatever happens, there’s no going back from the era of low-cost air travel.”[/size][/font]
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Isn’t he bored with fighting over Europe’s uninteresting aviation market? “It’s very hard to get bored. We kick the crap out of BA, Lufthansa and Air France and it’s not many industries where the Irish can beat the Brits, the Germans and the French.” Doesn’t he yearn to revolutionise the long-haul market instead? “We have a plan to be a low-cost transatlantic airline offering 10 Euro-seats across the Atlantic. But there’s a backlog of long-haul aircraft deliveries, because Airbus and Boeing made such a balls of delivering their long-haul planes – they’re between three and a half and four years behind – that there’s no spare long-haul capacity around.”[/size][/font]
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But if he did fly Ryanair to the US, he would be taking the low-cost model back home. In 1987 O’Leary, now 50, was sent to the USA by Tony Ryan, former head of Guinness Peat Aviation and Ryanair’s first chief executive, to study the business model of Dallas’s no-frills Southwest Airlines. At the time, Ryanair was operating one plane out of Waterford airport and losing money, and O’Leary had been hired to advise Ryan on his personal income tax.[/size][/font]
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In Dallas, O’Leary met Herb Kelleher who ran his airline on four principles: fly one type of plane to cut engineering costs; keep overheads down; turn aircraft around quickly; ditch air miles. Ryanair under O’Leary copied those basics. In the subsequent 24 years, Ryanair has grown inexorably. But the airline’s 20% increase in profits in the six months to the end of September was made possible in part by a 13% increase in average fares, which helped to offset a 37% rise in fuel costs. And over this winter, Ryanair will withdraw 80 of its aircraft to reduce winter losses and cut its soaring fuel bills. “I’m in a very long line of Irish transport innovators,” says O’Leary. “We built all the roads and most of the railway lines, and now we’re proving that you can fly across Europe for 20 quid and make money from it.”[/size][/font]
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But for how much longer? O’Leary must be worried about the emissions trading scheme due to be introduced by the government in January, to encourage airlines to reduce their environmental impact. “The whole pandering to the idiotic environmental lobby, which has been trying to persuade us wrongly that global warming is a fact of life, is stupid. It’s not that I say there isn’t global warming: I say that there isn’t evidence to support it. And even if there is, and it warmed by one or two degrees, France would become a desert, which would be no bad thing, and the Scots would grow wine and make buffalo mozzarella.”[/size][/font]
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He’s enjoying himself, this grotesque defender of deregulation, this climate-change sceptic, this calumniser of politicians, this right-wing bruiser with a runaway mouth. I ask him which politicians he admires. “Not since Thatcher and Reagan left the scene at such tragically early ages have I admired any politician. For all the abuse they got, those two fundamentally changed the US and UK economies. Governments since have pissed that away by wasting money on the NHS and all these other useless quangos. Governments never create jobs – they should just get out of the way.”[/size][/font]
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He describes this week’s dismal youth unemployment figures as “an absolute tragedy”, then adds: “But one of the great crimes perpetrated in the UK economy recently is the old Labour attitude of getting rid of competition. Getting rid of exams, closing down football pitches – idiotic. Life’s about competition. We’re not all fucking equal. Sadly, there are people who are faster than me and better-looking than me, so I had to find other ways to compete. Kids need to learn those lessons.”[/size][/font]
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I wonder if he plans to teach the four children he has with his ex-banker wife, Anita Adamson, those lessons. “I’ll make sure they’re hard-working. My kids won’t inherit my wealth. I’ll give them money for a nice house but, other than that, go and provide for your own family.”[/size][/font]
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Did his parents teach him the competitive spirit modern kids lack? O’Leary was raised on a farm in Westmeath. "Fucking hell, I don’t know. This is psychoanalytical Freudian shite! Life’s not about looking backwards.[/size][/font]
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“I grew up without much money and I wanted some. I was never going to inherit anything. Nor should I have done … Everybody should provide for themselves and their families. That’s the reason I get out of bed in the mornings.”[/size][/font]
Reading there on Broadsheet.
Some guy was looking up flights with Ryanair £123, went back the following day to check the price, it had gone up to £276.
Cleared his cookies, went back onto the ryanair site, fare was back down to £123.
Some boyos.
Isnt this old news?
Some buachaill in fairness to, have to admire him.
Ryanair are some sneaky bastards. Doing an online check-in there and the baggage that I’ve added and paid for has disappeared from the price so if gives you the illusion that you never booked any baggage in, then if you do go to book a bag in it charges you the price of two bags (£45). If you don’t add any baggage your boarding pass will tell you have already a bag booked so it’s in but they’re basically trying to con you into booking another bag in as well as automatically ticking travel insurance and other such stuff in.
They are some sneaky, sneaky bastards. :shakefist:
The man is a genius.