Ryanair’s recent cancellations debacle
has meant that 400,000 bookings will be scrapped because of a shortage of
pilots and problems relating to their holiday allowances. If you are a customer
of Ryanair who has booked one of these flights then their attitude is “TOUGH”. It
serves you right for choosing a cheap flight with a cheap airline.
Ryanair really don’t care what customers
think about them, because they know there are enough people who are prepared to
put up with terrible service, so long as they can save money.
All well and good so far. But the
business model of ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’ will always eventually fail in
the end, because sooner or later your rivals will start cutting prices to buy a
slice of your market share.
Any business that offers cheap prices,
combined with poor customer service, can never be sustainable in the long term.
There’s nothing wrong with adopting a low-price business model, but you STILL
have to offer good customer service alongside the low prices.
The problems this month at Ryanair
should be absolutely no surprise to anyone who has ever flown with them. Ryanair
has always shown utter contempt for its customers, and this starts right at the
top, with the company’s long-standing Chief Executive Michael O’Leary.
So we thought it would be fun to
reproduce a few of O’Leary’s quotes, just to illustrate the contempt
he has for the people that pay his outrageous salary (which according to the Irish
Post is €3.26m).
On refunds:
"You're not getting a refund so
**** off."
On overweight passengers:
"Nobody wants to sit beside a
really fat ****** on board. We have been frankly astonished at the number of
customers who don't only want to tax fat people but torture them."
On turbulence:
"If drink sales are falling off
we get the pilots to engineer a bit of turbulence. That usually spikes up the
drink sales."
On travel agents:
"Screw the travel agents. Take
the ******* out and shoot them. They are a waste of bloody time. What have they
done for passengers over the years?"
On going to the toilet:
“One thing we have looked at is maybe
putting a coin slot on the toilet door so that people might actually have to
spend a pound to spend a penny in the future. If someone wanted to pay £5 to go
to the toilet I would carry them myself. I would wipe their bums for a fiver.”
And most outrageous of all:
In 2004 a court ruled against Ryanair
in its decision to charge a man with cerebral palsy and arthritis £18 to use
his wheelchair on a flight. The airline vowed to appeal against this decision, and
responded by saying it would introduce a 50p wheelchair levy on every passenger
to cover the costs.
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