Posted by Seth on November 28, 2009 under News | 
It is hard to tell if this is a negotiations ploy or a serious move, but Aer Lingus appears to be making overtures towards moving their base of operations out of the Republic of Ireland. The Irish carrier has applied to the CAA in the United Kingdom for an operating license. Should the license be granted it would be possible for planes that are currently operating under an Irish license to be transferred to a newly established company in either Belfast or London to operate from there. Even more importantly, however, is that the “new” company would need to hire a whole bunch of new employees and the old company would have no planes and would simply dismiss all their employees. Folks who want to continue working for Aer Lingus would then reapply for their existing jobs at the new company.
Obviously the move would be a huge blow against the labor unions, the same groups that Aer Lingus is currently locked in rather contentious negotiations with. So maybe this is posturing and maybe it is for real. But reading this bit in the article was particularly interesting:
Aer Lingus has a huge issue with it long-haul pilots, who make up to $500,000 a year on the Atlantic route and have golden pension plans as well. Ryanair pilots, by comparison, are only paid half that amount.
Making half a million a year is a quite posh salary level. Of course the implication that the Ryanair pilots are making a quarter million annually seems high so I’m not sure that the other numbers are really legit. But that’s an awfully large salary base to handle with the current financial woes that many airlines are facing. Even in good times I’m not sure how it was profitable to fly while paying out salaries at that level.
Supposedly there is a deadline in the coming week for negotiations with the unions to be successful in identifying cuts or there will be layoffs and route cuts. And there is no timeline on the application for the new operating certificate. Lots of fun in the Isles with plenty more on the horizon. Still, having the flying shamrock actually being a British company baase would be just plain strange.
Posted by Seth on July 23, 2008 under Uncategorized |
And they don’t have a profit center built around this new product. According to the carrier’s head honcho Michael O’Leary mobile phone usage will be coming by the end of the month on an experimental basis, pending final regulatory approval. Rates will be “normal” roaming rates, with O’Leary stating that “There’s no way that we can take a cut” of the revenue from the service. I actually find that hard to believe since they have to carry the equipment to facilitate the service which will cost them money, but I guess we have to believe him since he’s made the claim and I can’t prove otherwise.
Particularly entertaining to me is the concerns people are sharing of the middle-of-the-night call somewhere over the Atlantic or other long-haul flights. First-off, Emirates already allows some mobile usage on their longhaul flights and the crew can shut off the service on the night flights. Second, Ryanair doesn’t fly longhaul flights. And it isn’t clear based on the articles I’ve seen, but I’m willing to bet that they will be using a terrestrial service, not a satellite service for the connectivity, meaning it wouldn’t be available over the oceans even if the airline flew those routes.
I’ve made calls on planes before, back when Verizon owned the Airfone service in the USA and it wasn’t too expensive for their customers. And I’d do it again in a similar situation, but it just isn’t worthwhile for random conversations. Considering that folks are already cutting back on discretionary spending with respect to mobile phones (see Vodaphone’s earnings announcement from this quarter if you don’t believe me), I doubt that this is really as big an issue as people are making it out to be.
Posted by Seth on July 17, 2008 under Uncategorized |
And it isn’t like they can really cut any of their services, as that would basically mean no more seats or no more flights.
In this case Ryanair has chosen to reduce the number of flights they are offering over the winter and also shifting their market to warmer destinations where they expect to see more traffic. The carrier will be grounding 15 planes at London’s Stansted over the winter as well as four planes in Dublin. They will likely be reducing frequencies on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturday mornings – traditional slow travel periods – and also shuttering 7 destinations from early November to mid-December, opening them back up in time for the holiday season. The locations that are closing up are Basel, Budapest, Krakow, Palma, Rzeszow, Salzburg and Valencia. At the same time beach routes will be added to Ibiza, Tenerife and Malaga.
Posted by Seth on April 4, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Skybus, a “Ryanair-esque” carrier (that was absolutely nothing like Ryanair other than charging for EVERYTHING) based in Columbus, OH (CMH), shut down operations today. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s in addition to Aloha, ATA and Champion Air over the past couple weeks. Low fares, low loads and high costs would seem to be the culprit here, as in the other cases.
There’s going to be a significant drop in the availability of cheap fares (which I’ve already been seeing a lot of – I can’t get a cheap flight to just about anywhere to pick up a few more miles), and of seats in general, so don’t plan on too many cheap and easy trips this summer.
This may just be what the rest of the carriers need to stay in business, or maybe they just have enough extra money to make it a little longer before declaring bankruptcy themselves. Northwest and Delta are on the top of many folks’ list for the next to go (back) into bankruptcy, though they have enough big money behind them that they are likely to continue operations even at that point. Well, one of them is at least.
Posted by Seth on February 22, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Faced with the need to upgrade their reservations systems, Ryanair has chosen to do what any reasonable company with thousands of customers a day would do: shut it all down for the weekend. Yup, that’s right – they are completely shutting themselves off from their customers for three days this weekend. The outage will include their web site AND their call center, so basically customers will not be able to get any information at all from the company, though they will keep flying.
Considering that customer service was never too high on the list of things that Ryanair cares about this approach isn’t all that surprising, especially since this is also probably the cheapest way to do things, another of Ryanair’s hallmarks.
