Ryanair Is Right About One Thing: It Doesn’t Know Its Customer

The online reputation of a company like Ryanair, which depends on it, is in the gutter. You only need to look at what is being said to see that references to the airline are constant and, when added to sites where negative comments already existed due to shortcomings or deficiencies in the service, they do the company no favours at all. As I mentioned in a previous article, if the controversy was about ownership of the customer, as though they were an object, the data reflected by Google show which side the Spanish customer prefers to be on.   If a company like Ryanair, with the media noise it generates (sometimes in poor taste), is unable in Spain to achieve even a quarter of the traffic generated by the online agencies it is confronting, or by other airlines with smaller budgets, then something is being lost. Perhaps it is the customer themselves who prefers to turn to an online agency. Certainly, if the aim is to gain market share at a stroke by stripping online agencies of their search positioning and market share—even though they are generating business for the airline anyway—this is neither an elegant nor an intelligent approach. What is happening? Quite simply, if the customer does not visit Ryanair’s website to buy their ticket, the airline misses the opportunity to sell them other ancillary services, which can sometimes generate more profit than the airline seat itself. Whether they are sightseeing tours, villa rentals, hotels, travel insurance, gift vouchers, transfers or car hire. What a coincidence: the very same services sold by the online agencies whose customers they want to take away through a pressure tactic.