Why Fly In Europe? The Dark Triumph Of The Ryanair Effect

It has had a rebarbative, blighting effect across the entire aviation industry. The Ryanair model, for want of a better term, prides itself on minimal, no-frills service for eye popping prices. The Irish-based low-cost carrier was intended to revolutionise European air travel by offering a budget option for the eager and easy holiday maker. In time, this seemingly attractive option has become a handy model to emulate by more traditional airlines, who have become mere shadows of themselves. National carriers, in other words, are now shameful replicas of budget airlines, with one exception: prices have been kept high and, post pandemic, even higher.

Not that flying Ryanair and its various rival cognates is necessarily the cheap option it’s meant to be. By all means use it, but make sure your luggage is jokingly minimal. In fact, preferably take nothing at all. The very appearance of baggage on one’s person, let alone a bag to check-in, will add a series of fees that end up wiping out the initial enthusiasm, let alone perceived advantage of the cheaper price.

Things get even better when told that you have to pay an additional fee to print a boarding pass at the airport, a ludicrous expectation that is much like handing a penalty fee to an airline for doing what they would already have to do. In other words, this particular model renders those incidents of travel taken as commonplace a cashable commodity.

The post-Covid era presented a ripe chance for traditional airlines to pair back services, remove any semblance of comfort, and make the customer pay for the pleasure of this mutilation. The academic literature on this is cooly impersonal, finding these decisions the expedient consequence of responding to a crisis. A co-authored paper in Research in Transportation Business & Management examining European airline responses to the pandemic, for instance, noted “a sudden and dramatic contraction in terms of fleet size, workforce and network coverage as airlines sought to contract and consolidate their operations.”

This contracting and consolidation has become nothing less than a savaging, with Europe’s national carriers showing no appetite to return to the level of services they provided before. All must be paid for. Instead of the standard, unspectacular stodge offering of a sandwich or similar alternative, the food and drink options available in the front seat pocket are given a restaurant dash that promises airy glitz for little return. Profiles of the food providers are supplied in the brochure, often featuring a dreamy chef who never imagined that his little culinary scrap would end up on a national European airliner.

The complimentary bar service long seen as part of the national airline experience has become another additional feature to purchase. Meagre and mean, this policy also extends to the provision of coffee and tea, which have been deprived of their complimentary status. That additional money needs to be forked out for tepid drinks that never exceed the quality of ditchwater should precipitate onboard insurrection. But many a modern European traveller has become obedient to the provision of mediocrity.

On Lufthansa airlines operating within Europe, the extent of generosity can be gauged as follows: one can expect one complimentary bottle of water (two at a disgruntled pinch from cabin crew). To sweeten the austere service, complimentary chocolates are offered just as the cabin service is about to conclude.

This hideous thinning out of services, the adding of virtually all items of food and drink to the purchase list, the spartan air of rude offerings, have done little to improve the performance of airlines in what should matter: punctuality. In its Performance Review Report for 2023, the independent Performance Review Commission (PRC) of Eurocontrol found that punctuality had decreased further than 2022, making it the worst performance over two decades. This decline took place despite traffic still operating at below 2019 levels. A grim statistic leaps out: “On average, only 70.6% of the flights arrived within 15 minutes of their scheduled time in 2023 (77.8%) in 2019).”

Airlines and other components of the aviation industry have fostered a creature of their own making. By stripping their staff ranks, accommodating rebounding traffic has become increasingly impossible. Airlines, despite embracing increasingly sophisticated aircraft aviation technology still face, explained Ourania Georgoutsakou, managing director of A4E (Airlines for Europe), “a potholed regional road full of detours and traffic lights.”

To delays comes that other ruinous outcome: flight cancellations. In the first quarter of 2024, 6,803 Lufthansa flights, or 5.99% of total flights by the air carrier, were cancelled. (The German carrier blamed strikes for the extravagant figure.) The impressively horrendous statistic bettered by some margin the runner-up candidate, KLM, with 1,294 cancellations (2.27% of total flights).

With the triumph of the Ryanair model, ruthlessly emulated by belt tightening carriers who seem to treat their passengers as mere units of income, taking the plane in Europe is no longer an interesting, let alone palatable prospect. Train travel suddenly looks more appealing, but even then, the traveller will have to scratch around for some additional coinage and hope that the calendar offers the luxury of such travel. But now, it is time to mourn the passing of an aviation tradition that sees little chance of resurrection.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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