Ryanair costs have been slowly creeping up, whilst many others have been slowly coming down towards a level playing field in addition Ryanair have had (to continue pax growth) move to `normal' airports such as BHX to get growth, but here they face competion and normal airport costs.
I suspect that Ryan air is at or near it zenith, i am told that they now charge CC £1400.00 for course, but at many airports only pay them when they work and many soon get fed up and move on. There are only so many CC wanabes out there that are daft enough to cough up and sooner or later the word gets round.
Ryan have a lot of aircraft coming and if the market for second hand aircraft dips (many analysts think up to 25% of boeing and airbus back order are vunerable) then much of Ryanair business model could unravel, it was only last fall that MOL was shouting that Ryanair would still be profitable at 100 USD a barrel, but remember that assumes volumes remain high and the indications are that the slow down is hitting Ryan harder than Easyjet.
My forcast is that MOL will be gone in a year and a new more customer friendly team will be in,Southwest in the USA do not treat their customer with the sort of contempt that Ryanair pride them selfs on, Remember Gerald Ratner?
If Ryanair has to increase price to maintain profitablity, it will loose its one (and for many) only USP "we are cheap" they have no chance of taking £400m out of the cost base and this last weeks farce over the new booking system will have cost them dear and damage investor confidence that the business can manage major projects, pay peanuts you get monkey's