The emergence of an indigenous airline as Europe’s most profitable is remarkable. How Ryanair changed their pricing strategies to avail of a whole new market of people by-passed by the premium strategies previously used, began has transformed the industry.
Ryanair was founded by Tony Ryan, Christopher Ryan and Liam Lonergan in 1985.Tony Ryan had previously worked for Aer Lingus who had gained a government monopoly within Ireland’s airline industry. Ryanair were keen to break this monopoly, as well as the duopoly of flights to and from Ireland and Britain held by Aer Lingus and British Airways and soon introduced a 15 seater embraerer bandeirante turboprop from Waterford to Gatwick. The new fledgling airline issued direct competition with Aer
Travel agents were seen as unnecessary and no more than an added expense which potentially could prevent business .O’Leary speaking on the 20th of June, some 6 months after the launch of www.RYANAIR.com spoke highly of its contribution to Ryanair record levels of growth stating “Firstly it is both profitable and cash positive. Secondly, because Ryanair has historically sold some 60% of our seats through travel agents, the switching of a large proportion of this traffic to the internet is generating large savings in CRS fees and agent commissions which are not available to other low fares airlines who have never had to bear the high costs of travel agency distribution” (http://www.ryanair.com/doc/investor/2000/results_end_2000.pdf). The results of the website spoke for themselves, in the first month alone it incurred 4.5 million in revenue. In the year ended, Ryanair profit after tax was up 26% to 72.5 million. The website now accounts of 100% of sales and it further invested in 2013 in a new web developer to over haul its website with a modern and well-functioning set up, it announced the news through the free median of twitter saying “first of many changes for Ryanair.com”.
Ryanair in the past was renowned for their lack of investment towards customer services but now all this has changed. The budget airline Ryanair has improved its customer service with a range of “enhancements” even allowing people to alter their bookings for up to twenty hours. Taking customer feedback into account, gathered from online surveys, Ryanair began to introduce a range of improvements to their customer services. Some of these notable improvements