Ryanair responded to a blogger’s post about a glitch on their website with juvenile, aggressive comments. (You can read the full Times story of Ryanair’s peculiar response to a blogger’s innocuous post here: Ryanair, best for cheap.)
Ryanair are a budget airline. The entire business is run on a shoestring in order to provide cheap flights. Clearly, shoestrings don’t create the most joyful of workforces, and perhaps this is the cause of the vitriolic reaction to a well-intended post by a blogger.
The interesting thing about this story is that Ryanair have followed up negative and bitter comments on the original blog post with official statements that are even more damning:
“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.
Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere [sic] all to themselves as our people are far too busy…”
Now, the reason this is crazy is because, even if Ryanair really don’t care what bloggers think or write, and even if Ryanair are happy to create such a negative media storm needlessly and pointlessly, then they should care about the effect of all the negative links. “Idiot bloggers” may have a considerable impact on the results that appear when people search for Ryanair.
Perhaps the people who want extremely cheap flights don’t care about the negative publicity…? Is that why Ryanair think it’s acceptable to behave in this manner?
Whatever happens, it’s sad that Ryanair couldn’t have joined the online discussion in a more sociable way!
I’m not at all surprised by Ryanair’s reaction – from Michael O’Leary down to the stewards, good manners are just another thing that are not included in the price of your ticket. Ryanair never claimed to be anything but cheap – leave good customer services to BA (and then, maybe…). Michael O’Leary said “The European consumer would crawl naked over broken glass to get low fares”.
I’ve flown with Ryanair a few times, usually vow never to do so again, but they’re the airline equivalent of that Chinese restaurant in Soho that gets cheaper the more floors up you go while the waiters practically throw the food at you. People go back anyway, sometimes they only go for the abuse. I’ve seen Ryanair staff talking to passengers like idiot children – to be fair in most cases the passengers deserved it.
I can’t see this harming Ryanair. It’s amazing that their website isn’t set up to provide automated abuse.
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Comment by Nathan Nelson — February 25, 2009 @ 5:39 pm