Spendthrift Shoestring

Ryanair: Site vs. Print

Last week I flew Ryanair between Stansted and Newquay. It was the typical Ryanair experience, though at least the flight attendants weren't exuding disaffected distance or discussing their health problems whilst wheeling the refreshments cart down the aisle.

Looking over the in-flight magazine, I was surprised by the utter lack of unwitty, aggressive snark so common to Ryanair's news releases. This was the first time I've read the Ryanair in-flight magazine in at least a year and a half, and I was pleasantly surprised. There were pithy destination guides, a look at fashion in Stockholm, a very interesting article on foraging for food, and a story on Lodz. The production level and the absence of witless, gratuitous snark were both miles from Ryanair's weird press release strategy, which appears to prioritize the act of starting fights over all else.

Flash: Ryanair's Continental Moves

On Tuesday, Ryanair announced that they'll be flying between Stansted and Zweibrücken as of October; yesterday they announced four new routes out of Bremen and five out of Marseille, including two domestic routes (Marseille-Brest and Marseille-Lille). The further development of domestic routes within France parallels the announcement in mid-March of the airline's first domestic routes in Germany and France.

These routes seem to be opening up a new strategy for the airline. It will be interesting to see if they'll be followed up by more domestic routes in France, Germany, and elsewhere.

April 2008 LCC Performance Digest

With the continuing stream of bad aviation industry news, you could be forgiven for imagining that Europe's low-cost carriers are all in crisis. In fact, this is not quite the case. To wit: April's performance stats for Ryanair, Air Berlin, and SkyEurope.

Ryanair's load factor fell 4 percent in April against last April 2007's numbers, from 83 percent to 79 percent, while their passenger numbers rose 15 percent, up to 4.72 million passengers. In offering an explanation for the former stat, Ryanair's press release notes that Easter occurred in March this year, thereby explaining last April's high load factor and, by extension, this April's 4 percent load factor decline. One understands why the airline failed to mention the positive effects of an Easter bump in their March 2008 statistical round-up.

Air Berlin had universally sunny numbers in April, with a 4.5 percent load factor increase (from 74.3 to 78.8 percent) and a 6.5 percent jump in passengers, to 2.24 million. Air Berlin's stats include passengers served on some other airlines, all part of the Air Berlin Group: Belair, LTU, and Luftfahrtgesellschaft Walter.

On its surface, SkyEurope's April performance appears to be the worst of the three. The airline's load factor fell from 82.1 percent to 70.7 percent, while the the number of passengers flown declined 4.7 percent, to 280,000. Note that SkyEurope's press release title erroneously trumpets last April's passenger numbers. Odd. These numbers don't look good. I'm hoping that the changes made by the airline over the last many months will improve their future stats.