As someone who lives on this tiny island and must fairly often travel elsewhere for work, I find myself not infrequently having to take Ryanair flights.
It is perhaps unnecessary to say that I am not a fan of the whole experience. Very few people are. Not enjoying the Ryanair experience is, in a sense, a crucial component of the Ryanair experience. You’re not supposed to like it; you’re just supposed to pay for it, and because most of the time it basically works, and because it’s usually cheaper than the other available options, you’re supposed to come back and pay for it again.
It is, in this sense, a bit like Amazon: easy to object to, tricky to avoid.
I do not like the airline’s passive-aggressive approach to customer service, and I like even less the insistent feeling of being processed by a system of logistics in which passengers are treated as a kind of bulk livestock cargo.
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I do not like, perhaps above all, its approach to the concept of boarding, whereby passing through the boarding gate does not mean that you are about to get on the plane, but that you are about to stand around on a set of stairs with 180 or so other people for an incredibly long time, waiting for a guy in a reflective vest to come by and unlock a door so that you can walk through it and finally get on the plane.
The one thing I do appreciate about Ryanair, though, is that it prevents me and my countrymen from getting too complacent about our nation and its place in the world – from believing too unquestioningly in our own moral superiority. It’s true, we’re not the English, or the Germans, or the French, or even the Belgians: we don’t have imperial conquests or genocides on our national record. But we would do well to remember that we have subjected our fellow Europeans to Ryanair, and that indeed we continue to do so. We’re no angels.
All of which is to say that I am by no means a Ryanair booster. And yet, over the past few days, I have glimpsed the possibility – remote though it may be – of the Ryanair customer experience actually worsening, and have felt myself, against all expectation, feeling almost defensive of it.
The reason for this is that, earlier this week, in the course of an argument with the airline’s chief executive Michael O’Leary, Elon Musk publicly raised the prospect of his buying the company.
The argument arose out of Musk’s public dissatisfaction with Ryanair’s refusal to become a client of Starlink, his satellite internet service, in order to provide wifi on its fleet of jets. According to O’Leary, the equipment would cause aerodynamic drag and increase fuel costs by hundreds of millions per year, and passengers wouldn’t stand for the resulting increase in ticket costs. He also (correctly) called Musk an idiot who knew nothing about commercial aviation.
[ Ryanair would install wi-fi if Musk’s company foots the bill, O’Leary saysOpens in new window ]
One thing led to another, until Musk announced, on X, that O’Leary was “misinformed” and that he was, in his own right, “an insufferable, special needs chimp”. (What Musk was doing here used to be known, in the language of publications like this one, as “taking to Twitter”. There was a subtle but important difference between merely tweeting and “taking to Twitter”; the latter was typically undertaken, almost always by a famous person, in a spirit of exasperation or embattlement. “Taking to Twitter” is – like tweets about things you don’t see so much any more – a thing you don’t see so much any more.)
When, in turn, the official Ryanair account “took to Twitter” (or X) to link to a news story about X suffering widespread outages across the US, and to joke that perhaps Musk himself needed wifi, the argument escalated. “Should I buy Ryan Air and put someone whose name is Ryan in charge?” Musk asked his followers, in an instance of the attempted epic-bacon-sauce humour for which he is widely and justly reviled.
He then posted a poll, requesting his followers’ opinions on whether he should purchase the airline, and hire a guy named Ryan to run it. (Musk seems not to know that the airline was, until O’Leary’s reign, run by a guy named Ryan, and that no one found it particularly funny then either.)
When Musk took over Twitter, I remember having a sense that there was only so much damage he could do to a social media platform whose most frequent users routinely referred to it as “the Hellsite”, and thought of themselves as damned souls condemned to spend their days on it. But I was very wrong. Musk’s X, with its AI-generated sexualised imagery of children, and its relentless amplification of fascists and white supremacists, has in fact become immeasurably worse.
And so, as unpleasant as the experience of being a Ryanair customer currently is, it would be foolish to conclude that it couldn’t get any worse were Musk to buy the company. Small on-board fires would quickly be normalised, as eventually would larger ones; toilets doors would be removed to reduce overheads, and then toilets themselves; customer complaints would be dealt with by publicly denouncing dissatisfied customers as paedophiles.
[ The EU should channel Michael O’Leary when dealing with Donald TrumpOpens in new window ]
There would, it is true, be a seductive irony in the prospect of Musk becoming the owner of Ryanair. This is a man, after all, who was once primarily famous for selling a fantasy of manned space flights to Mars, for claiming he would save humanity from existential threat by making us a multi-planetary species. There would be a cheap bathos, in other words, in his pivoting to budget flights to Luton and Malaga.
It might not, in the end, be the worst thing that could happen. I finally deleted my Twitter account recently – partly due to the aforementioned ideological noxiousness, but, if I’m honest, mostly because of the related matter of its having become profoundly boring and unusable. Perhaps a Musk-owned Ryanair would be the thing that finally forced me to bring an end to my vexed customer relationship with the airline.
