Ryanair’s craziest ideas – from standing cabins to adult entertainment
Would you let Ryanair plan your next holiday? The airline’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, seems to think you might, given he’s just floated the possibility of his airline offering package getaways in the future.
“The holiday product is probably a reasonable way of charging higher fares and yields and for wrapping it into a package,” O’Leary told The Telegraph, displaying his signature fixation on boosting profits.
Ryanair first mentioned offering package holidays in 2016, but never delivered. Given that easyJet has been selling package deals since 2019, industry watchers have suggested that O’Leary now wants a slice of the pie.
That could well be true. But given the Ryanair boss’s habit of getting publicity by suggesting things that never materialise, you can never be too sure. He has even been nicknamed “Michael O’Really” by aviation wags.
Here are some previous examples to make you think twice:
Transatlantic flights
It’s now almost 20 years since Ryanair grabbed headlines by suggesting that it would soon expand into the long-haul market, offering cut-price tickets to the United States. “By mid-2009, we will be carrying 70 million passengers at 23 bases across Europe,” said O’Leary at the time. “It will be relatively straightforward for us to do a deal for 40 to 50 long-haul aircraft and connect these bases transatlantically. There would be no-one to touch us.”
Of course, this tantalising proposition never came to fruition, but that didn’t stop O’Leary playing the same card again a few years later. Since then, we’ve seen various other airlines offering budget flights to the States – most recently Scandinavian carrier Norse – but nothing from Ryanair.
Perhaps one day we’ll see that iconic golden harp landing at JFK or LAX, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
£1 to use the loo
Having a reputation for cost-cutting is one thing. But charging to use the toilets is quite the other – especially on a four-hour flight.
No wonder, then, that Ryanair hit the headlines in 2009 when O’Leary told the BBC that he was considering fitting his toilet doors with coin-slots so that passengers would have to pay £1 to use them. “I think you have to spend 20p to go to the toilets at Liverpool Street Station,” he said, attempting to justify the proposal, and later added: “I would wipe their bums for a fiver”.
Luckily, this particular cheapskate idea appears to have been consigned to the dustbin. Although given that contactless pay points are commonplace on train-station toilet doors, you can never be so sure.
One toilet per plane
Sticking to the toilet theme, O’Leary courted controversy again in 2011 when he suggested he would remove bathrooms on his planes in order to make room for more seats.
Rather than the usual three-bathroom setup, Ryanair planes would instead make do with a single loo, which O’Leary suggested would save passengers around £2 (in 2011 prices) on the average ticket.
Given the toilet queues under the current layout, we can all be thankful that this one never got off the ground.
Standing cabins
Here’s another idea that somehow refuses to die – thanks in no small part to Ryanair’s founder giving it a fresh airing every few years.
Would standing cabins ever really work on a plane? Not according to aviation authorities, who have spent years rubbishing O’Leary’s view that planes are just “buses with wings” that can safely carry standing passengers. “Seatbelts don’t matter,” he proclaimed.
“You don’t need a seatbelt on the London Underground.” When it came to landing, he suggested, passengers could “hang on to the handle” and would be “fine”.
A less charitable observer might also point out that most Ryanair flights do now feature a standing element: the part where you have to spend 20 minutes on one of those awful terminal buses where all the seats are taken.
Having only one pilot
“Why does every plane have two pilots?” asked Michael O’Leary back in 2010, sounding less like an airline boss and more like an inquisitive child on a cockpit tour.
Did Ryanair ever seriously consider saving money by going without co-pilots and instead training cabin crew to take over in the event of a medical emergency?
Perhaps not – but that didn’t stop O’Leary airing the idea during a sit-down with one of the world’s most respected business publications.
“Let’s take out the second pilot. Let the bloody computer fly it,” he told Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Asked what would happen in the event of a medical emergency, he suggested a trained member of the cabin crew might help. “If the pilot has an emergency, he rings the bell, he calls her in. She could take over,” he added.
Having passengers load their own bags
What’s the point of paying to check in a bag if you then have to lug it to the plane yourself? Perhaps it’s no wonder that Ryanair never followed up on this idea after O’Leary mooted it back in 2009.
“I am struggling to understand this. They haven’t discussed this with us,” said a flustered spokesman for Stansted Airport in response. “There are security and practical considerations to be taken into account.
“For a start they would have to work out where a passenger would pick up a bag after putting it through the screening process. Also there are aircraft moving around the tarmac.”
Then again, perhaps O’Leary was slightly ahead of his time on this one. Who’d have thought back then that supermarkets would have us voluntarily scanning and packing all of our own items?
Business-class tickets
The idea of flying business class with Ryanair seems like a contradiction in terms – hence the buzz when the budget carrier trialled its “Business Plus” tickets back in the summer of 2014.
Given there wasn’t any separate cabin, lounge access or free hospitality, it’s understandable that Ryanair later dropped the word “Business” from the deal. But the concept of having premium tickets stuck around, hence the current “Plus” tickets which offer speedy boarding and extra bags.
For once, then, O’Leary made good on his promise – albeit without the flat beds.
Fat tax
Plus-size passengers have been a bit of an obsession for Ryanair’s chief executive during his time in the limelight.
His comments about introducing a so-called “fat tax” – an extra charge for overweight flyers – still come up in press coverage some 15 years after they were uttered. “A ‘fat tax’ will only apply to those really large passengers who invade the space of the passengers sitting beside them,” explained a spokesman in 2009. “These charges, if introduced, might also act as an incentive to some of our very large passengers to lose a little weight and hopefully feel a little lighter and healthier.”
At the time, O’Leary suggested that he was merely listening to feedback from his passengers. Anyone who has seen Ryanair’s notoriously combative X/Twitter page, will know how unlikely that is.
Adult entertainment
Like many Ryanair stories, this one reads like it could be an April Fool – that is, until you actually check the date…
It was November 2011 when O’Leary said that Ryanair was working on an in-flight app – accessible through tablets or smartphones – which would offer paid-for content, including pornography and online gambling. “I’m not talking about having it on screens on the back of seats for everyone to see,” O’Leary told The Sun. “It would be on handheld devices. Hotels around the world have it, so why wouldn’t we?”
Needless to say, it never happened. Not least as it would require Ryanair to actually install some in-flight Wi-Fi.
No more arm rests
Compared to pay toilets and porn apps, the idea of scrapping armrests might seem rather mundane.
But the suggestion of removing them – originally floated in 2012 – also gave an insight into the extraordinary lengths that Ryanair apparently goes to save money on jet fuel by reducing unnecessary weight from its planes. After all, it didn’t hesitate to remove seat-back pockets.
According to other comments made at the time, other fuel-saving tricks included reducing the amount of ice taken on board, slimming down the size of the Ryanair magazine, and using lighter trolleys for the bar service.
