Treat them mean and you’ll keep them keen

ANOTHER day, another Ryanair controversy. The only surprise is that anyone bothers even raising an eyebrow any more.

Right, let’s see now. In the space of the past week alone, thousands of passengers had their flights cancelled due to a one-day strike by pilots. Two further stoppages are planned for the coming days.

Meanwhile, the airline was forced to deny claims that four cabin crew members in Spain were sacked for refusing to fly due to fatigue. Never a dull moment at Ryanair HQ by the sounds of it.

The most recent bit of drama came on Friday evening when flight FR7312 from Dublin to Zadar in Croatia experienced a loss in cabin pressure. It was forced to make an emergency landing at FrankfurtHahn airport in Germany, where 33 of those onboard required hospital treatment.

Thankfully no-one was seriously injured, but what happened next had a familiar ring to it. Ryanair apparently agreed to put up the affected passengers in hotels, but then said there was a ‘shortage of available accommodation’.

Meanwhile, the passengers – some of them now under medical instructions not to fly for at least another week – were seemingly left to fend for themselves. ‘We are abandoned at the airport. No bus, no alternatives, no place to rest,’ one of them tweeted. ‘No information, no alternatives, no place to rest.’

I’ve been that soldier, albeit in less fraught circumstances. Along with several hundred others, I spent two full days at Paris-Beauvais airport some years ago when bad weather led to the cancellation of several flights.

No, I’m not going to depress us all by reliving the entire experience here. By far the worst aspect of it, though, was the complete absence of any updates on when we could realistically expect to get home. Suffice to say the whole thing was so badly handled that I vowed never to fly Ryanair again.

To be fair, I managed to stick to that pledge for a couple of years. My resolve was finally broken when I spotted a cheap flight to Nice that, unlike the alternative options, didn’t involve setting the alarm clock for 4.30am. Since then, I’ve been a semi-regular customer again.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Even when everything runs according to plan, travelling on Ryanair still couldn’t be regarded as a pleasurable experience.

For starters, the seating is clearly designed with the cast of Darby O’Gill And The Little People in mind. Then you’ve got the garish colour scheme, the inflight scratchcards and that deeply irritating bugle jingle every time they land on schedule.

Nor, frankly, am I taken in by Michael O’Leary’s occasional attempts to re-brand Ryanair as a more customer-friendly airline. I’d be more inclined to think of it as a cynical short-term marketing exercise whenever bookings are down or the share price looks like slipping. Equally, though, I don’t buy into the myth of Aer Lingus as the all-caring earth mother of Irish aviation.

Practically everyone I know who travelled to Britain during the Seventies and Eighties did so by ferry, mainly because they couldn’t afford the exorbitant fares being charged by the national airline at the time. I was a couple of weeks short of my 20th birthday before first getting on an aeroplane and, even then, that was only because AN Other – either the music magazine I was then working for or, far more likely, some record company or other – was paying for it.

Credit where it is due, Ryanair brought in a revolution. It turned air travel into a genuinely democratic experience insofar as (a) it became available to all and (b) everybody could expect to be dealt with in an off-hand manner.

Regardless of how many complaints there are from those DublinCroatia passengers, nothing will change. Being nice simply isn’t in the Ryanair DNA. And, yes, I will always find the prospect of stepping on to one their planes ever so slightly soul-destroying – but the bottom line is I’m not in a position to turn down a flight that might actually cost less than the cab fare to the airport.

Part of Mr O’Leary’s genius is he realises you don’t need to be nice if you are affordable. And he knows that just like someone unable to keep away from a lover who repeatedly treats them like dirt, we’ll still come back for more.