Things in the Sky

Well, it’s been rumored for awhile, but now it’s finally happening. Yesterday, Ryanair announced it will launch its 42nd base at Barcelona this coming September, with 270 weekly flights to 20 destinations. The busiest routes will be those to Malaga, Palma, and Seville, with 14 weekly frequencies each. The Irish airline will base five 737-800s at the airport.

Photo Credit: Andy_Mitchell_UK on Flickr. (Licensed through Creative Commons.)

The carrier also notes that it “will allow the airport to tap into the low fares market, which continues to grow, and which has so far been absent from the airport.” I guess the presence of Air Berlin, EasyJet, and Vueling don’t count?

Ryanair claims that its presence “will help reverse declining traffic numbers at El Prat airport,” which could certainly be true – low fares absolutely stimulate demand. But as this article from Flight notes, Ryanair will not have a presence on the Barcelona – Madrid route. The route remains one of the world’s busiest but has seen passenger declines due to a new high-speed rail line – and Ryanair can’t increase the number of passengers flying if they’re not on the route!

I also wonder what the net gain in passengers will be for Ryanair. The airline currently serves the Barcelona area through Girona and Reus. So how many passengers will find El Prat more convenient now? My guess is that these operations might shrink a bit if there’s some leakage to the new Ryanair base.

Nevertheless it’s good to see some new competition here as we have seen some consolidation in the Spanish market, with Clickair and Vueling merging under the latter’s name. And Iberia has a 45% stake in the airline, to boot. Meanwhile, Iberia has said that it will be launching a new short-haul airline and use the Iberia name for long-haul operations. It’ll be interesting to see how that looks.

Have you ever gone through Ryanair’s online press room? It’s just hilarious. Usually, most companies in all industries will be very diplomatic in their public communications, but Ryanair, not surprisingly, doesn’t pull any punches.

For example, take this part of a press release from last week:

Ryanair, the World’s favourite airline, today (Friday, 6th November 2009) announced that it carried four times the UK and Europe short-haul traffic of British Airways (once the World’s favourite airline) in October as 6.2m passengers travelled throughout Europe on Ryanair’s guaranteed lowest fares (up 15%) while BA’s short haul (UK and Europe) traffic fell by 4% to just 1.6m passengers.

Ryanair celebrated its continued growth and leadership over BA by releasing 1 million £5 seats for travel in late November and December, which are available at www.ryanair.com until 24:00hrs Monday (9th Nov).

(Emphasis mine.)

For some reason, this hasn’t gotten old for me yet – still makes me laugh, every time!

EDIT: Ok, in a weird twist of events, despite confirming that this was indeed them, Ryanair is now telling Tavolution that @Ryanaironline is not their account. Whoops. Apparently it was just a prankster, and the Ryanair representative thought Travolution was talking about another Twitter account. If anyone cares, my original post can be found below.

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In July, Court from the Airplane Geeks Podcast convinced me to join Twitter, and ever since I’ve become a complete addict. I have found the service to be quite useful, though, and I have met a lot of great people through it.

Anyway, a few airlines have been using Twitter very well as a new way to engage with their customers. Now, Ryanair has also joined that group, and it’s taking a slightly – er – different approach. In fact, I at first doubted that this was an official profile because so many of the tweets were just plain mean and offensive. But, according to Travolution (via @BizAvWeekly), this is the real deal. Let’s look at the company’s bio:

It is Ryanair policy not to waste time & energy corresponding w/idiot bloggers & Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

And there are some great Tweets, like this one:

Just wanted all you idiot bloggers to know we can hate your idiots while on your distribution channels. Any questions or comments? Stuff it

Or this gem:

Wow getting to paid to read your drool is painful. You people should be taking dirigibles with the hot air you blow. You could bolster lead.

Heck, Ryanair even took shots at other airlines:

@JetBlue ooooooooh 122K following you! You are so COOL! (Original Tweet)

@SouthwestAir Do you guys think you are cool because you are on twitter? (Original Tweet)

Just take a look at the airline’s Twitter page. You can find plenty of other “highlights.”

This isn’t a terrible PR move. It has generated a good amount of buzz. To be honest, I got a few chuckles out of the sarcastic humor at first, but it soon got old. The airlines that I have dealt with the most on Twitter (Soutwhest, JetBlue, and Alaska) all do a fantastic job of effectively using these tools to communicate with current and potential customers. Ryanair, on the other hand, can generate a bit of short-term buzz, but if it keeps up this style of Tweeting, it will become old very fast, and will probably just annoy people. But who knows, maybe very low fares will make people look past it.