I fly around Europe for €30-€100 per return flight without a checked bag. Yet Ryanair are one of the most profitable airlines in the world yet charging such cheap prices. Are other airlines just not as efficient as low cost airlines?
In: Economics
A lot of different things, the basic premise of low cost is to remove everything that is “non essential” (or add it back as a fee)
* So they’re only cheap if you stick to the bare minimum: moving from A to B, but they’ll slap you with additional fees for everything (carry on bag, seat selection, etc). It would be interesting to see what is the real average ticket price per customer.
* They use out of the way airports with lower fees
* They’ll cut corners on everything up to the legal limit, like making their pilots fly more hours etc.
Edit: Looked up last Annual Report for Ryanair .
Ancillary Revenues (inflight sales, luggage fees, etc) add ~47% vs Ticket sales.
So for a 100€ Flight, they on average book 147€ total revenues.
Edit2: I’m talking from memory, so it might not be true anymore, but they also used to have a “simpler” fleet of planes (like leasing a bunch of A320 from Airbus) that made maintenance simpler vs the large companies that have a mix of Boeing, Airbus, long range/short range.
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