Based in Dublin Ireland, Ryanair is Europe's largest and most controversial low cost carrier.
To check-in for a Ryanair flight at the airport costs extra (web check-in is free and has the added advantage of allowing one to skip the queues and overcrowding at the airport). You have to have an EU or UK passport to check in online.
A per item fee for checked-in luggage is charged on Ryanair flights.
website bookings |
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telephonic bookings |
Austria |
0900 210 240 |
Belgium Dutch |
0902 88 009 |
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Belgium French |
0902 88 007 |
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Czech Republic |
+353 1 249 7745 |
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Finland |
0600 160 10 |
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France |
0892 232 375 |
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Germany |
0900 116 0500 |
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Hungary |
+353 1 249 7748 |
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Ireland |
0818 30 30 30 |
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Italy |
899 67 89 10 |
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Latvia |
+353 1 249 7743 |
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Lithuania |
+353 1 249 7748 |
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Netherlands |
0900 20 22 184 |
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Norway |
820 00 720 |
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Poland |
0300 303 033 |
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Portugal |
+353 1 249 7791 |
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Slovakia |
+353 1 249 7746 |
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Spain |
807 220 032 |
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Sweden |
0900 2020240 |
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Switzerland |
0900 808 001 |
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UK |
0871 246 0000 |
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Rest of World |
+353 1 249 7791 |
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Ryanair has 28 bases in Europe (Alicante, Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Bremen, Bristol, Brussels, Cork, Derry, Dublin, Dusseldorf, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Girona, Glasgow, Liverpool, Luton, Madrid, Marseille, Milan, Nottingham, Pisa, Reus, Rome, Shannon, Stansted, Stockholm & Velencia):
In May 1985 Ryanair became Ireland's second airliner (Aer Lingus was the other airline), co-founded by Tony Ryan (an Irish tycoon), Christy Ryan (not a relation of Tony Ryan, although he was Godfather of Tony Ryan's son Declan) and Liam Lonergan (Catlan, Declan and Shane Ryan were the funding shareholders with £1 million from their father, Tony Ryan). The original plan had been to name the airline Irelandia, but by May 1985 they decided on Ryanair after Christy Ryan, whose idea it was to start flights between Waterford and London (he was from Waterford). The Ryanair team, headed by Eugene O'Neill, first operated from a small prefabricated building at Waterford airport.
Ryanair initially had a licence to operate flights from Waterford (in the South-East of Ireland) to London Gatwick and back, and in July 1985 the inaugural flight was flown; beginning a daily return flight service. The first Ryanair flights from Waterford to London Gatwick and back were in a 15-seat propellor-driven Bandeirante plane (leased by Guinness Peat Aviation - GPA - a company owned by Tony Ryan). Within a few weeks they were managing to fill up half the seats on the plane, encouraging them to double business to two return flights a day from Waterford to London Gatwick.
Ryanair flights from Dublin to LondonWhile Ryanair's aim with the Waterford to London flights was to prove to the Irish government that they could run a route efficiently and safely, their sights were set on competing on the lucrative London to Dublin flight route. In December 1985 they received a licence to operate Ryanair flights from Dublin to Luton airport. Crucially, although only an hour's travel from London, Luton airport was not classified as a London airport; meaning that Ryanair could undercut the airfares of Aer Lingus's flights from Dublin to London (in 1985 there were minimum airfares which had to be charged on flights from Dublin to London). Tony Ryan described the awarding of the flight licence as being "the most exciting route opportunity ever to be given to any independent airline operating (flights) into or out of Ireland". After being delayed for 42 minutes, at 0842am first Ryanair flight from Dublin to London Luton (FR201) took to the air on the 31st May 1986. The flight was in an old Viscount which could carry 43 passengers.
In 1987 the following Ryanair flight routes were opened up:
flights between Cork and London Luton
flights between Dublin and Cardiff
flights between Dublin and Knock
As a result of a misguided attempt to protect Aer Lingus, the Irish government refused to grant Ryanair a licence to fly from Ireland to continental Europe. Tony Ryan therefore purchased 85% of London European Airways (LEA), a London Luton based airline, in December 1986. In January 1988 LEA was relaunched as Ryanair Europe, allowing Ryanair to sell flights from Dublin to Brussels using London Luton as a hub. At the start of 1989 it was clear that the Ryanair Europe experiment wasn't working and it was closed (one of the first steps taken by the incoming chief executive, P.J. McGoldrick).
On 1 March 1988 Ryanair launched flights from Manchester to Dublin and back, later in March 1988 flights between Galway and London Luton were launched and then in April flights from London Luton to Shannon were launched. Later in April flights from Glasgow to Dublin and back were launched. And then in May 1988, flights between Liverpool and Dublin were launched. However, the competition from Aer Lingus was fierce and unrelenting - and by October 1988 both the Manchester-Dublin and Glasgow-Dublin Ryanair flight routes were history. With the airline's accounts in a mess and losses obscured from view, Eugene O'Neill was acrimoniously dismissed in early 1989. Declan Ryan was appointed interim chief executive until Tony Ryan appointed P.J. McGoldrick as chief executive in October 1988.
After closing down the scheduled flights of Ryanair Europe, McGoldrick restructured Ryanair into 5 parts:
Ryanair based in Dublin
Ryanair Europe (the charter services), based at London Luton airport
Ryanair Engineering, based at London Luton airport
Ryanair Fleet Management
Ryanair Tours and Leisure
In May 1988 Michael O'Leary walked into Ryanair's Central Dublin offices for the first time; having been sent in by Tony Ryan to stop the losses the airline was making (£4m loss in 1985, £6m loss in 1986, £7m loss in 1987). Within a month O'Leary reporeted that Ryanair could not be saved and recommended it be closed down, but Tony Ryan would have none of it. Michael O'Leary did not immediately start running Ryanair; his brief was to look after Tony Ryan's assets, the largest of which was Ryanair (although the company was nominally in Tony Ryan's children's names). O'Leary watched as P.J. McGoldrick took over from Eugene O'Neil.
Under the leadership of McGoldrick the strategy was to step away from head to head competition with Aer Lingus. After closing down Ryanair flights from Glasgow to Dublin and Manchester to Dublin in 1988, McGoldrick opened up flight routes from Kerry airport to London Luton, as well as from Knock (in the west of Ireland) to Leeds/Bradford and to London's Stansted airport. In May 1989, McGoldrick announced the very significant opening of a Ryanair flight route from Dublin to London Stansted airport (in Essex). Aer Lingus very quickly followed with opening its own flights from Dublin to London Stansted.
By the end of 1989 Ryanair was on the brink of collapse, and Tony Ryan informed the Irish government that he would only put more money into the airline if he got government protection from Aer Lingus's predatory tactics. Ryanair successfully lobbied the Irish government to change to a two airline policy, by dividing up Britain's airports between Aer Lingus and Ryanair. In particular, the Irish government decided that London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports would be the sole domain of Aer Lingus, and London's Luton and Stansted airports would be only for Ryanair flights.
At the end of a 1991, a year in which Ryanair recorded its first profit ever (£293,000), P.J. McGoldrick resigned as chief executive. By this stage Michael O'Leary had been appointed Chief Financial Officer, and Tony Ryan appointed Paddy Murphy as chief executive. Murphy lasted six weeks and in December 1991 Conor Hayes was appointed chief executive of Ryanair. Michael O'Leary wanted out, but agreed with Tony Ryan to stay on in return for himself getting 25% of any profit Ryanair made above £2m (which shows that Tony Ryan had little concept of how profitable Ryanair could become).
On the 23rd June 1993 Conor Hayes formally handed in his resignation as chief executive of Ryanair, but stayed in office until the end of the year. On 1 January 1994 Michael O'Leary officially took over as chief executive of Ryanair.
Dec 2009 |
Ryanair plans on having 40 planes able to handle Blackberrys and cellphone calls. |
Mar 2009 |
Ryanair plans on having increased the number of planes able to handle in-flight mobile phone calls from 15 in July 2008 to 50. |
Mar 2009 |
A base is planned to be opened at Forli Airport, becoming Ryanair's 4th base in Italy. |
14 Dec 2008 |
Flights between Bristol and Rzeszow will cease. |
4 Nov 2008 |
Ryanair plans to stop flying between Bristol and Budapest. |
27 Oct 2008 |
Seven routes are transferred from Forli to Bologna Airport:
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27 Oct 2008 |
Ryanair starts new Ireland West Knock to Liverpool route. |
26 Oct 2008 |
Ryanair starts a new Birmingham to Prague route. |
Oct 2008 |
Ryanair plans to start twice-weekly flights from London Stansted to Agadir, Morocco. |
Oct 2008 |
Ryanair adds 6 new flight-routes from Madrid (Spain). The Ryanair flights link Madrid with Liverpool in England, Santander and Gerona in Spain, Cagliari and Alghero on the Italian island of Sardinia and Frankfurt-Hahn airport in Germany. |
25 Aug 2008 |
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Sep 2008 |
Ryanair are looking to introduce mobile phone calls on 10 of its Dublin-based Boeing 737s by end August, as they await regulatory approval. The boxes being built into the planes will be able to handle up to 6 simultaneous mobile phone calls and unlimited text messages. |
11 Aug 2008 |
Ryanair threatens to start taking action against website "screen scraping", the practise whereby other websites take details of Ryanair's website and make a mirror copy elsewhere, in the process completing a Ryanair booking without the passenger ever visiting the Ryanair site. From the 11th August 2008 Ryanair planned to start cancelling "screen scraping" flight reservations. This contrasts with Flybe (a low cost carrier), which allows external parties access to its flight reservations system. |
27 Jul 2008 |
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22 Jul 2008 |
Celebrating with free tea and coffee, Ryanair operates its first flight from Kerry to Dublin , with a Boeing 737-800 leaving Kerry at 0625 and arriving in Dublin at 0705. |
11 Jul 2008 |
Ryanair wins an injunction from the Hamburg Regional Court in Germany against Vtours GmBH, to stop them from scraping flights and timetables from Ryanair's website and presenting them for sale to their customers. |
9 Jul 2008 |
Ryanair exercises options to have 3 Boeing 737-800 aircraft delivered in June 2010. |
6 Jun 2008 |
Ryanair signs a 5 year agreement with Britvic International to supply cooldrinks (e.g. juices, 7-Up, J20 and Pepsi) aboard its flights. |
5 May 2008 |
Cost of checking in a bag increases to 8 pounds, and cost of using a check-in desk increases to 4 pounds. |
29 Apr 2008 |
A Ryanair plane, flight FR1624 from Lodz to East Midlands, runs off the runway at Lodz Airport in Poland. |
14 Apr 2008 |
Bridget Dowling is appointed sales and marketing manager for the UK and Ireland. |
28 Jan 2008 |
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni file a lawsuit against Ryanair, after the Le Parisien newspaper published their photo with a bubble coming out of Carla Bruni's mouth saying in French, "With Ryanair, my whole family can come to my wedding" (at this stage it was not public knowledge that the couple would marry on the 2nd February 2008).
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5 Feb 2008 |
Nicolas Sarkozy (French president) Carla Bruni (France's first lady) win a court case against Ryanair for using a photograph of them in a Ryanair advert without their consent. French Judge Louis-Marie Raingeard awards Bruni 60 000 euros and Sarkozy a symbolic 1 euro. |
14 Feb 2008 |
As a Valentine's day gesture, Ryanair gives away free airline tickets (excluding taxes and charges of course) to the 50 best kissing couples on Leicester Square in London. |
22 Feb 2008 |
Ryanair shuts down its website for 3 days (from from 22:00 on February 22 to 23:59 on February 25) whilst it moves to a new flight reservation system (telephone customers will also not be able to book flights whilst the site is down) |
26 Feb 2008 |
With the opening of Ryanair's new website, it has undertaken to include airport taxes in its advertised prices. |
| Oct 2008 |
Ryanair planned date for opening a base in Reus, Barcelona. |
The headline prices of Ryanair flights are kept at low levels through a combination of very low costs and making money out of passengers outside of headline flight prices.
Sick bags are only handed out on demand. No window blinds on planes. Seats on planes do not recline. No velcro-anchored headrest covers. No pocket seats (where passengers normally find a free magazine.
Marketing expenses are kept down by creating hype through controversy, rudeness, taunting other airlines (see list of Ryanair quotes) and court cases:
In 2003 Michael O'Leary, dressed in army fatigues, drove a World War II tank to London Luton airport; leading a battalion of Ryanair staff to the offices of easyJet - claiming to be on a mission to liberate the public from easyJet's high fares. O'Leary, armed with a loudspeaker, urged his "troops" to join in with a platoon march song, "I've been told, and it's no lie, easyJet's fares are way to high".
Complaints are minimised by insisting that they be in writing, and by never giving refunds. O'Leary himself has said that he would have no qualms in telling somebody who wanted a refund on a Ryanair ticket to "f$%^ off".
Outside of charging the headline flight prices, Ryanair have a number of ways of making money out of passengers. A range of products are sold on board the flight, with beverages being sold for high prices to the captive market. There is a surcharge for use of a wheelchair. There is a "Priority" charge for passengers who want to jump the queue to get on the plane earlier (which are only worthwhile if departure airport ground staff are in a working mood).
Here's a video of a Ryanair plane landing at EDDN:
Name |
Comment |
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ryaniar complainer | ryanair over price their flights, and give a poor service |
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Ryanair flight FR9336 from Bristol to Barcelona loses air pressure and conducts an emergency landing at Limoges International Airport. Some passenger suffer from earache as a result of the rapid descent, but nobody is seriously injured. The plane was a Boeing 737-800, 5-years old, and had been serviced a month before the flight. 
The Italian government is furious with Ryanair, after it publicised a photo of one of its politicians giving the middle finger, with the ad's text suggesting the gesture is at Italian passengers (for supporting Alitalia). 
