Fare is fair

If you believe O’Leary’s widely spruiked new strategy for the world’s sixth largest airline by passengers carried, Ryanair has seen the error of its passenger experience ways (so delightfully lampooned by British comedy singers Fascinating Aïda – see YouTube) and promises a more pleasant trip.

At 2014’s Ryanair, gone will be the cattle-call boarding process where you scrummed for a seat. Gone too will be the one-and-only-one carry-on policy, in favour of an American-style personal item in addition to your carry-on.

So long, blaring announcements on the 0605 flight to an airport with fewer vowels than passenger services, with “quiet flights” promised in the early morning and late evening.

And adieu to the Ryanair. com-only booking policy. O’Leary’s airline plans to work with Google on an as-yet undefined distribution plan and fare comparison product, as the technology and travel media breathlessly reported – a clue, perhaps, that Ryanair is not quite finished with its free media tactics.

Why would it be? Those tactics have worked exceedingly well. The press covers announcements that the airline wants to charge for the lavatory, ban staff from charging their mobile phones at work, or add standing-room only seats (to name just three). And the airline’s own advertising is carefully crafted to look as if it was produced by the work experience teenager using Microsoft Paint.

Ryanair has succeeded in setting passengers’ opinion of them at rock bottom, as proven by the (frequently reported) worst European airline lists.

The idea, naturally, is that flyers imagine Ryanair’s prices must be rock bottom too – though these days they rarely are, once optional charges and getting to remote Ryanair airports are taken into account.

At the airport and on board, expectations were equally subterranean.

Your (then London-based) columnist remembers flying Ryanair as its fleet converted, in the early 2000s, to the current vintage of Boeing 737-800s.

Lurid fluorescent yellow was added to the previously staid cabins.

Seatback pockets and safety cards disappeared, replaced by the laminated card stuck to the day-glo back of the headrest in front. Ads appeared everywhere, and the incessant exhortations to buy scratchcards, bus tickets and calendars with scantily-clad “Girls of Ryanair” were piped at full blast over the PA system. As a skint newly-minted Londoner keen to travel Europe on long weekends, the deals were irresistible. Treviso, Västerås, Torp, Säve – these airports (for Venice, Stockholm, Oslo, Gothenburg) – grew and flourished.

The image of deplaning via the 737’s stairs onto the fields of Gothenburg City Airport, where the baggage tractor was hooked up to farm wagons to transport baggage, which was claimed in one side of a shed, ‘roped’ off by cones and signified with plywood painted with the word “BAGAGE”, is a memory not soon forgotten.

But it seems that those halcyon days of pile-the-737-high, sell-the-fares-cheap, treat-the-self-loading-cargo-as-such are gone.

Whether it’s a true realisation that passenger experience matters, or the lure of the corporate travel market where Ryanair has been a no-go option, “in 2014, Ryanair is changing,” O’Leary promises in (of all things) a YouTube video, plugged on Ryanair’s new (gasp) Twitter account.

Ancillary revenues may be part of it. “We will roll out new products for families and business travellers”, an earnestly pink-shirted O’Leary explains. “A brilliant new website” may enable additional charges by choice (rather than by entrapment, which is the current model), with a business traveller booking channel also on the cards.

First on the list? Fully-allocated seats on all flights from March 3, for ten euros or pounds (for a seat you’d want) or five for a regular seat. And those second personal item carry-ons? Only the first 90 to board are guaranteed space for a second item, so you might want to fork out seven pounds/euros for priority boarding (which comes free if you’ve forked out for seat 25B).

But it’s not hard to think of the new, friendly Ryanair as just a ploy. Could it be that the worst of the airline’s customer-unfriendly policies had received such exposure that few passengers were falling for them? Could it be that the boarding scrum wasn’t actually the best way to load an aircraft? Could it be that nobody was buying scratchcards, scratchcards, scratchcards after waking up at 3am to take the bus to deepest, darkest wherever? And could it be that the round of European funding that left local and regional airports flush with cash to attract Ryanair has dried up? Ask Ryanair passengers if they care. O’Leary just needs to say “how high” and they’ll jump through any number of hoops for low fares.