NEWS ROUND-UP Ryanair boss tells retailers: ‘screw the airports’


In a characteristically candid and colourful presentation delivered at June’s Future Travel Experience conference (FTE) in Dublin, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary (right) called on duty free & travel retailers to work with Ryanair to ‘screw the airports’, whilst restating his ambition for Ryanair to become the ‘Amazon of travel’. On the topic of duty free and travel retail,


he shared his view that ‘retailers are getting screwed by the airports’ and said that for this reason transactions needed to be moved away from the airport. He said that airlines and retailers needed


to work together to take the transaction out of the airport and make the airport shops more like showrooms. “It’s payback time,” he said.


“Let’s all work together to screw the airports. Let’s work with the retailers to screw the airports.” Interestingly – as has already been


reported by TRBusiness – Ryanair’s ancillary revenue forecast has been revised up from 27% to 30% by March FY2020, which goes some way to underlining Ryanair’s more concentrated focus on this area of their business. O’Leary believes that air fares will


eventually be driven down to zero…at least on the majority of flights. Interestingly, his colleague in the audience


also revealed that 45% of the airline’s customers already buy ancillary products, although O’Leary said he was convinced that this percentage was ‘much higher’ at more like 60%. Ryanair was asked about ‘disruptors’ in


the travel industry and the threat of these companies to Ryanair in particular, to which he replied. “Flights are not up for disruption. Everyone still has to fly.” Despite the agility of the airline and


the speed at which it can make decisions, O’Leary has been reticent to offer connectivity onboard up to this point. He said that this was down to the fact that


he would be losing €80-100m a year due to a 4% drag factor – due to the functional requirement to fit a very heavy aerial to the aircraft. “Our fuel bill was already €2bn last year,” said O’Leary. Since launching its package holiday


service and the ‘MyRyanair’ personalised digital platform over a year ago, O’Leary has made it clear that revenue growth will not be driven by airline tickets. Instead, the airline is openly and


very publicly focusing on ancillary revenue generation. It also plans to ‘take on’ hotel/booking


aggregator and price comparison sites, such as Expedia and booking.com which he deems ‘useless’. He said: “Booking.com are useless. They


don’t own a brick. We are going after them in Europe...I own the customer in Europe because we have the lowest fares.” He also reinforced his opinion about his reluctance to work with Google. “Google


are not getting a cent of us.” Ryanair has always been clear about its business model and have driven democratisation of travel harder and faster than any other airline. O’Leary believes that costs will


continue to be driven down to basically zero. “The majority of seats will be free, obviously not on bank holidays and things like that.” O’Leary readily admitted that Ryanair’s


method of collecting customer data used to consist of just capturing their credit card information. He said the airline has since learned


that it needs to know more about its passengers. However, he remained resolute


in his view that the airline really owns the passenger, ‘not Google, Expedia, or Booking.com’. who he believes are ‘scamming the customer one way or another.’ “We’ll be using real time customer


info to prompt packages, hotels, flights that customers want to book/order before they initiate the process themselves,” he added. He also said that customers are given an


incentive (a huge discount) to book directly on Ryanair’s website. Indeed, many other airlines have since


followed suit.


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