Ryanair - really 'no frills?'
 

I need some advise on Ryanair and the 'no frills' airline sector.

What do you think are Ryanair's main strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities?

What Economical, Social, Political and Technological factors affect the airline?

What is Ryanair's strategy?

Will they ever be as succesful as the main airlines such as BA?

Thank-you all responses are greatly appreciated....

lala_brit
;) :confused:

I hope that your essay gets really good marks.

Q What do you think are Ryanair's main strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities?

A MOL

Q What Economical, Social, Political and Technological factors affect the airline?

A Same as all others

Q What is Ryanair's strategy?

A F:mad: D if anyone knows!

Q Will they ever be as succesful as the main airlines such as BA?

A They already are

Rgds
The Moss:ok:

This question is actually pretty meaningless. Ryanair does not do the same job as BA and is unlikely ever to do so. So the question is a bit like asking whether your local town's bus company will ever be as successful as National Express - they are simply not comparable.

Just a few observations
 

The traditional carriers are first and foremost network operators. They will get you and your bags from any point on their network to any other point with a single fare, a single ticket, the minimum of hassle (that’s the theory anyway). These are the real frills and they have real costs attached – think of the baggage transfer system under any hub airport. Most of their passengers are point-to-point, they are paying for these facilities but not using them.

The biggest single cost advantage the LoCos have is seating density – 25% more seats means 25% lower unit costs.

The LoCos in general but especially Ryanair are into maximising their non-ticket revenues – subsidies from the airports, but also inflight catering, car hire, insurance, photo developing, hotel bookings, anything that will turn a few pennies.

Nobody is ever going to make a profit with £1.99 or even £19.99 fares. The money is made as the aircraft fills up and the upper fare levels kick in. The last batch of passengers on a Ryanair flight will have paid fares close to business class. Failures in the LoCo sector probably didn’t pay enough attention to this.

Ryanair’s business model is substantially different from the others. Easy fly to where they think the market is. Ryanair will fly anywhere if they believe they can line up the costs and non-ticket revenues in order to get the fares down to rock-bottom level.

Ryanair does not do the same job as BA and is unlikely ever to do so.

Sure they do. The only difference as far as I'm concerned is that BA interlines and ryanair don't. Oh yeh, ryanair also provide food on board :)

So lala_brit, why don't you just provide answers to your own questions and I bet we will have some fun...

Well, this short thread has given me more laughs than many others!!! lala_brit since you registered on PPRuNe today and this is your first post, it may well be that you are a student but my ATR went off [Advanced Troll Radar] thanks for the laughs anyway.

Still, if you are serious, do some searching on this site and you will find many, many threads about FR. It is not often that you can say a company devises a new angle but MoL is such a fabulous b@st@rd that he appears to have done so. By this, I agree with Ballymoss, that MoL is both the strength and the weakness.

Look at any company run by a dictator and the worry is: What happens when the dictator goes. This holds true for any commercial company, as much as it does for countries with actual dictators. Dictators tend not to do succession planning! :p

I think that Ballymoss and Globaliser have given you the 100% of the possible answers.
--------------------
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

sounds like somebody has to do a SWOT(strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) analysis for the Marketing101 class and coun't google her/his way out of it. Darn, whats the next option.

I'll give you one hint......



yield management, their are not there to fill their seats, but to have the highest yield out of everyflight. This involves forcasting. And smart consumers (if you'r flexible off course) can beat forcasting.





don't ask, just think

Airlines have been using yield management since the sixties. Maybe the new ones think they have a better model? Easy seems to, I read once they see their software as giving them a competitive advantage which can be applied to car rental, internet cafe pricing, cruise ships, la de la de la. So the legacy airlines will also sell you a cheaper seat if you book in advance. Where I suspect the newbies differ is their corporate culture values the customer who pays £1.99 equally to the customer who pays £199.99. The legacy carriers don't see it this way.

For the record, should "provide" be changed to "sell"!

It's not obvious whether that is a question or not, but you may replace my word with yours if it makes you happy. To me, it means the same thing.

Those carriers who provide meals without payment at the point of service are hiding the cost of the meal in the ticket in much the same way as they hide the cost of the jet fuel in the ticket. Er, well that's how it used to work! At least your no frill carriers give the consumer the choice of whether they wish to pay for airplane food. With other carriers you pay for the food whether you eat it or not. Which one is the more customer centric approach?

Really??? An astonishing statement IMHO - Clearly Ryanair have implemented some remarkable changes very recently. I'm not "knocking" Ryanair - they do what they do, very well: But to suggest parity in all areas bar one with BA strikes me as odd. :confused:

slim_slag apologies, following a recent Ryanair experience, perhaps I should have questioned the use of the word "food"!
:p

I just hope BA have everything sorted when I travel to LA with them at the end of this month.
:hmm:

dogs_ears,

Yes, as far as I am concerned, that's how I see it. FR are point to point, BA have interline agreements. Bottom line is they both ship me from A to B for a mutually agreeable price. BA go to places FR don't, and FR go to places BA don't. LH go to places neither of them go. I no longer spend enough money with BA for them to provide me the so called 'full frills' services that Ryanair don't provide to anybody. So, as far as I am concerned (and I suspect this will be the experience of the vast vast vast majority of airline passengers) there's no difference between the pair. If anything, I have another one, you could say FR have better policies when it comes to reusing funds for tickets not used. I think one of them deserves to succeed more than the other, but it's not enough to make a difference to me when it comes to spending money.

newswatcher :ok: I always took my own food when in the back with BA anyway, so no difference to FR.

It's not just the food I was thinking about. Couple of G&Ts with the film. :D :D

Slim_slag,
BA may have interline agreements and may even carry a few passengers who interline onto other carriers but far, far more relevant is that you can make online connections on BA. They will fly you from Prague to Chicago or from Stockholm to Jo'burg.

Which is why BA, Air France, Lufthansa etc refer to themselves as 'network carriers'. If you want to fly Ryanair from, say, Glasgow to Berlin via Stansted, you have to buy two tickets, pay two sector fares, check your bags twice - and you have no recourse if you miss your connection.

Apart from the obvious, that BA flies longhaul, almost all other differences between them are just a matter of degree.

Yield is nothing to do with it.

RYR make their profits through playing the aviation industry, not selling airline seats. Even if you sell all 189 seats on a 737-800 on a trip to Rome for £15, you make precisely £0.00 (even in euros!) once you take out staff costs, fuel costs, mortgage or leasing costs, airways charges and landing fees, handling fees, maintenance, depreciation etc.

However, you buy and lease 50 737-800s after flogging three to five years maximum use out of them and you make megabucks. Also, if you charge everybody for food, water, wheelchairs, excess baggage, inflight sales, advertising, car hire, hotels, buses and everything else they might need on one of your flights you also make £££'s.

That's Ryanair's secret. They cut cost base to the bone, then maximise revenue by anything but seat sales. They ain't never going to be BA, but they sure will prolong the myth of low-cost air travel for a few years to come, until MOL can buy Ireland and run it as his private fiefdom.

(sorry just realised he already does!!)

You should all recognise, by now, if you study slim slag's responses to other posts, he/she is very anti "heritage" carriers and has a personal dislike of BA!

She states there is no difference between BA and FR! I suggest that there are a few very big differences!

In the event of delay or cancellation, BA will apply the rules under the EU compensdation Charter - FR will not! (So far, MOL is waiting to see the results of the EU appeal court hearing before he will pay anything!)

Speaking for BA, we never needed an "EU charter" as, broadly speaking, we have always provided accommodation / transport / refreshment for stranded passengers without needing any legislation to enforce it!

The other big difference is that BA has never deliberately set out to mislead its customers. FR's advertising has had to be stopped many times as misleading, dishonest or untruthful!

BA, by and large, treat staff fairly and reasonably. FR treat staff in an appalling fashion, relying on their desire to enter the aviation industry at all costs in order to whip them into shape! Where MoL can get away with it, he flouts both employment laws and aviation working procedures and this is well-documented - particularly among the Irish press.

BA have never deliberately compromised the safety of either its own passengers or those of other carriers. FR's pilots had to be rebuked for regularly claiming they had insufficient fuel in order to jump ahead in the queue for landing. This could have had serious implications for other airlines' passengers as well as their own by making CAA controllers believe that genuine low fuel situations were merely "crying wolf"!

Michael O Leary repeatedly challenges the Boeing Technical Manuals believing maintenance procedures can be short cut. Thankfully, he hasn't yet been permitted to amend any schedules but the mere fact that he challenges Boeing's authority, when by his own admission he knows nothing about aircraft and has no desire to know anything about them, shows he has the potential to be an unsafe operator!

If you read my postings, you will find I dislike Ryanair and I dislike EasyJet. The difference is that I would fly with EayJet, I would never set foot on a Ryanair aircraft!!!

Actually bealine, if you read what I posted you will see I do not differentiate between FR and BA service at the price levels I am prepared to pay, so I am hardly BA bashing.

As for fuel safety, I don't believe most of the tittle tattle I read on these anonymous bulletin boards, which is why I am waiting for the final report on that 747 which landed at MAN.

I think O'Leary is saying that compensation should not exceed the price you paid for your ticket. Now you may not agree with him, but you have to accept he has a point. Now in my >500,000 miles with BA I have been treated very well and very shoddily. My most recent experience, BA cancelled the flight I had paid for, gave me no idea on when they might be able to transport me, and most certainly did not provide hotel or refreshments. They advised me to stay at home. Their only remedy was to refund the cost of my flight in full, no extra compensation was offered. Sounds exactly what O'Leary is saying, so BA and FR are pretty identical there too!

And I'm a 'he', you must be confusing me with my sister, 'fat' :)

You Gimboid has it right. Remember that MoL is an accountant. Now, I have nothing against them in principal, as my brother-in-law is one but MoL exemplifies their reputation.