Three Lions - I would have to agree with The Flying Cokeman here. It is undoubtedly true that in the past easyJet followed Ryanair - pay for hold baggage etc. That is, however, a long time ago and easyJet have wiped the floor with Ryanair recently. Ryanair have copied our website, allocated seating, business proposition and being polite to passengers to name a few. They are a long, long way off persuading anyone with a brain in their head that they actually value their customers, but Carolyn McCall is a million times better advert for easyJet than Michael O'Leary is for Ryanair. All his previous bravado and foolishness is just an embarrassment now to his shareholders and he is now a liability to the airline. He is too closely associated with the brash 'in-yer-face' comments that actually portrayed Ryanair for what it is - a company who became successful providing incredibly cheap but tacky flights with a staggering and almost immoral disregard for the well-being of their customers. Guess what - people increasingly do not want that now and unless they get a new CEO pretty quickly they will be in big trouble. The man has cooked his own goose in a big way and will leave a very rich man but with not a wet eye in the building. Let me remind some our readers of Mr O'Leary's more entertaining quotes and they can decide themselves whether he is an asset or liability to the 'new' Ryanair -
On passengers who forget to print their boarding pass: “We think [they] should pay 60 euros for being so stupid.”
On refunds: “You’re not getting a refund so **** off. We don’t want to hear your sob stories. What part of ‘no refund’ don’t you understand?”
On customer service: “People say the customer is always right, but you know what – they’re not. Sometimes they are wrong and they need to be told so.”
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 apologies: “Are we going to say sorry for our lack of customer service? Absolutely not.”
On Ryanair’s image: “One of the weaknesses of the company now is it is a bit cheap and cheerful and overly nasty, and that reflects my personality.”
I have laughed as much as anyone at these sort of remarks, but I can also see that such an attitude has only got a limited shelf life. That shelf life has now well and truly expired, leaving the big question as to who will Ryanair get to replace him to keep the show on the road?