Ryanair: The budget airline heading for oblivion or European domination?

Simon Calder, The Independent’s travel correspondent, has been following the much-criticised airline for three decades but wonders if we are all a bit too mean about it

Tuesday 19 February 2019 10:38 GMT
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Is the sky about to fall in for the much-maligned budget carrier?
Is the sky about to fall in for the much-maligned budget carrier?

Pity the poor Ryanair shareholder. According to the latest survey by Which?Travel, the Irish budget airline faces an uncertain future. To sustain its flying programme across Europe for 2019, the airline must sell 280 seats per minute. Yet according to the magazine: “Ryanair’s reputation has declined so much that thousands of respondents told the consumer champion that they would never again fly Ryanair, even if it was cheaper than its rivals.”

The editor, Rory Boland, said of the airline: “It has spent the past two years cancelling thousands of flights, ruining hundreds of thousands of holidays and flouting the rules on compensation as well. The results of our survey show passengers are fed up. They should switch to one of their rivals, which prove that budget prices don’t have to mean budget service.”

Ryanair’s share price has lost one-third in the past year, and is 40 per cent down on where it was in the summer of 2017. That was the summer when Ryanair started to upset passengers who choose not to pay for assigned seating. From May 2017, couples and groups who accepted “random seating” typically found themselves sitting in middle seats at the opposite ends of the aircraft. In September that year, thousands of passengers found their flights abruptly cancelled due to a shortage of pilots – which ultimately led to the grounding of 20,000 flights through the winter.

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