Ryanair’s executive president Eddie Wilson has promised ‘even cheaper tickets’ as the low-cost airline plots its strategy for a return to business.
Talking to Lusa, Wilson said the idea will be to “stimulate air traffic” through the coming months.
“What will happen is that prices will go down to encourage people to travel for a continuous period of time”, he said, suggesting this is the best solution for recovery from three months of virtual paralysis: “We can’t grow by increasing prices…”
But airlines Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, TUI and SAS “among others” are highly critical of Ryanair’s masterplan – largely because they have all asked for “millions of euros of public support”, be it by way of loans or straight subsidies, explains Lusa.
TAP in Portugal is in a similar boat: hoping for a State-guarantee for a €350 million loan after posting eye-watering losses for the last two years (click here).
Counters Wilson, this is the problem with airlines “who are rescued by governments for no reason”.
Large companies are being bailed out while others, “like Ryanair will have to adopt measures for themselves and try and stimulate air traffic”.
This will mean, certainly in the medium term, a reduction in prices.
Ryanair ‘normally transports around 150 million passengers a year’, running 2,400 daily flights from over 80 bases in Europe and north Africa.
It’s an airline where the ‘business model’ is based wholly on revenue from ticket sales.
In Eddie Wilson’s perspective a scenario where States keep large airlines ‘afloat’ with injections of cash is “a way of wasting money”.
“What’s the point of giving an airline money … if it’s not going to do more than it has already”, he quizzed.
Wilson took over from former Ryanair chief executive Micheal O’Leary last year.
O’Leary has gone on to oversee the whole Ryanair group, made up now of smaller airlines Buzz, Lauda and Malta Air.
Ryanair announced earlier this week that it will start picking up on its normal schedules from July 1 (click here).
