It had all been going so well. In early 2014 Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary announced a new strategy: the airline was going to start being nice to its customers. O’Leary had been famous for statements such as saying passengers who forgot to print their boarding passes should pay a £48 fee ‘for being so stupid’. The new Ryanair would be different.
The company’s efforts to be kinder to customers started paying off remarkably quickly, allowing passenger numbers and profits to bounce ahead after a relatively flat few years (Figure 1). Ryanair already flew more passengers than any other airline in Europe, now it hoped to build up from 120 million passengers a year to 200 million.
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