Ryanair rightly lost their case against disabled passengers who needed weelchairs to get them to the planes.
Then they issued a profits warning resulting in their shares taking a nosedive.
They’re reported as charging their own staff for such things as uniforms.
Finally, today the long awaited judgement from the EU was made. Broadly speaking, Ryanair have to pay back the money they took from Charleroi for using the airport as one of their hubs, amounting to around 4.4m euros.
The problem to my mind stems from the way that Ryanair are operating. I can understand why a local council wants to offer cash to an airline like Ryanair, since the local economy, particularly for tourism, can be opened up enormously. But state funding is state funding, and if it’s offered to one, it should be offered to all. If there really isn’t demand for a 737 to land in nowheresville France, then maybe we shouldn’t be flying there.
Ryanair’s load factor has dropped to 71%, which is why their profits are in such a parlous state at the moment.
I’m a big fan of budget airlines, although I think that Ryanair has been overvalued for a long time, to the cost of airlines like BA which have a solid customer base and serve routes that many more people actually want to fly. While it’s true that I would look at a special offer that Ryanair have on, and fly somewhere I otherwise wouldn’t have gone, just because it’s cheap, I’m not sure that this is a base to build an entire business on. Particularly when you start making claims about how much bigger you are than those established rivals.
The Sunday Times had an article at the weekend which made most of these points pretty well (we’ll gloss over how it was that I came to be reading The Sunday Times – the shame).