Ryanair ‘will not wait for anybody’ as Britons prepare for summer border chaos | The Travel Expert

Thank you. Sadly, no longer a young accountant. By the way, we're Europe's biggest airline, never mind biggest budget airline.

I think it sounds great. I mean, two reasons for the fall. One, fares are lower this summer than they were last year, and that's always good news for consumers. It means our traffic is growing strongly. We expect to grow by about 4% this year. We carry 28 million passengers last year. We expect to carry 260 million passengers this year, but at lower airfares. So, the good news is better deals than ever on Ryanair. The bad news is we've only hedged 80% of our fuel this year. So, we have 20% of our fuel is unhedged. The price of that doubled from about $70 a barrel to about $150 a barrel through April, May, and June. And so most of the fall in profits, which was a 38% decline in profits in the first quarter, was a result of this much higher oil prices on our unhedged fuel, but still giving away even cheaper fares than last year.

Well, they're booking. I mean, our traffic is still growing 6% in through the first quarter, but people are nervous. I mean there was all sorts of scare stories about Europe running out of fuel, airports would not have enough fuel. People were nervous on making bookings. I think as we move into the summer peak, they are traveling again, but they're price sensitive and they need to be stimulated and there's nobody better to stimulate low fare air travel than Ryanair.

It depends what happens in the long term to oil prices. I suspect what's going on in the Middle East will not be for the medium or long term. I think oil prices over the medium term will fall again. We're taking delivery. We've ordered 300 new aircraft. We take delivery of the first 15 of these Max 10 aircraft in the spring of next year. I would hope we'll continue to grow to 300 million passengers over the next 8 years. Keeping fares reasonably flattish. But there's no doubt if you look at our competitors across Europe, they all have very significant cost increases. They're all trying to cut capacity so they can pass it on in the form of higher airfares. We don't think that's the right way forward. We think the way forward is keep airfares low and keep people flying.

Well, I disagree. I mean, Europe, in my view, Simon, is inexorably moving towards four large airlines. So you'll have the BA family, Lufthansa family, the Air France family. All those guys want to do is put up airfares, charge you more for air travel. The Gulf carriers grounded has been a boon for them. They're charging outrageous airfares on their longhaul premium travel. But in Ryanair, we want to keep airfares low. We've committed to taking delivery of 300 new Max 10 aircraft costing about 30 billion in the next decade. So we have no choice but to keep growing. And the only way to keep growing is to keep fares low. The challenge for us is can we keep our cost low during that period of time, and I think with these new aircraft which are 40% more fuel efficient, we can keep our cost low and we can keep people flying across Europe at really affordable low airfares. To pick up on that, I don't know if you saw this week the boss of Emirates described his Boeing delivery, the Boeing planes that are coming in, as being only good for baked bean tins. Are you confident that your aircraft is going to be delivered on time and as you hope? Well, I'm meeting Boeing later this morning. In fact, here in London, they're over for the Farnborough Air Show. I mean, we're pretty confident. They still have to get them certified, but I think the Max 7 will be certified by the end of August and the Max 10 certified by the end of September, October. Our first 15 deliveries are in the spring of next year. So, January, February, March, April. We're pretty confident we'll get those aircraft. You know, you look around at aviation, internationally, the Boeing 737 is the most successful aircraft ever made. Half the world flies on a Boeing 737 every single year. So yes, we're confident these aircraft, they have development problems on the 777, the big expensive longhaul aircraft, but not on the 737. And I believe these new aircraft will transform not just Ryanair's ability to sell low fares for the next decade, but our ability to make more money selling low airfares for the next decade as well.

Well, the first 15 I think some we'll keep them at the main maintenance bases. So the first 59 will have probably five in Dublin and 10 in Stansted where we have all the engineers, the biggest pilot bases, etc. But once we get used to flying these over the next two or three years, they'll largely start off being distributed to the main bases, Dublin, Stansted, Bergamo, Madrid, Barcelona, probably Brussels, Charleroi, that kind of stuff. But once everybody's flown them, the pilots are getting used to flying them over the first year or two, they'll be distributed throughout the network. By the time we get to 2034, the end of the current order, we expect to have 300 of these aircraft. It'll be about 40% of a fleet of 800 aircraft at that stage.

Well, we're in the middle of the peak summer period. Firstly, it's not that bad. There are a number of black spots. We've identified 16 airports. It includes Lisbon, Madrid, Athens and Greece where it is particularly bad. It is unacceptable. I mean, firstly, this is another dumb regulation designed by Europe. The home of dumb regulations. They introduced it on the 1st of April. We have pleaded with them to defer the introduction to the 1st of November. Introduced it during the winter season, not the start of this busy summer season. No, it went ahead the start of the busy summer season. To be fair to the Europeans, they've allowed all of their countries to derogate and delay the introduction until the end of October, which is what they should do. But some countries don't want to be seen to be derogating. And so there are about 15 airports where there are real problems. Two to three-hour waits at border control, which to my mind is unacceptable. This is also something that should be done online. You don't need border guards doing their one-digit typing into systems with a big queue building. Everybody puts their details on the Ryanair website. That should be the vehicle by which if you need EES or passport information, the airlines should provide it to the border control, you run into the GDPR nonsense as usual. We should be automating all this and taking it online. If you go to the US, the ESTA process, which is the same, basically the same is all done online before you fly. And the EES should be done the same way. If I'm a passenger though, let's say at Milan Bergamo and I am stuck in a mile long queue and my aircraft is over there, how long are you going to be waiting for me? And if you can't wait for me, what am I going to do? Nothing. We will not wait for anybody. If you're stuck at an entry passport, our priority is to those passengers who are at the boarding gate when boarding gate starts. If you're not at the boarding gate when we finish boarding, the plane is going without you. What rights have you got in that? You don't have any, which is regrettable, but we're not delaying our flights for people who are stuck in passport controls. They have to show up at the airport earlier, but they have to be at the boarding gate, otherwise they're not flying.

Well, firstly, what Europe has done is yet another dumb regulation that doesn't work. The European Parliament, which is a circus of fools generally, have come up with a new set of regulations, by the way, at a time when they want Europe to be more competitive. They have sold it. All they have done is they said if airlines are advertising an airfare, the airfare must include the free second carry-on bag. So overnight you'll make the European airlines look even less competitive than they are today. Our lowest fare today is $19.99. If you want to bring a carry-on bag, the lowest fare we'll be able to advertise going forward in 18 months time with these stupid regulations will be $79.99, but with a big strap line underneath it you can reduce this by another 60 quid if you don't bring the second carry-on bag. Now the point the airlines have made, and it's not just Ryanair, all the European airlines, there is not enough space on board our aircraft for two bags per passenger. About 45% of our passengers can bring a second bag. We manage that by selling them a priority boarding service which gets you to board first and you bring the second, but that's closed off at 45% of the plane. 5% of passengers choose today they want the lowest airfare. And of course for the morons in the European Parliament, they don't care what people want. They have no idea what's going on in the real world. 99.99% of passengers want to know what's the lowest airfare. If the lowest airfare excludes a second carry-on bag, they're quite happy to travel without the second carry-on bag, and they do so daily in their millions. So, all we have here is another dumb regulation coming out of the European Parliament. The regulation doesn't work. All it does now is require this mad requirement that European airlines will now have to engage in false advertising. We'll now have to advertise higher airfares than are actually available in the system for people who want the lowest airfare. This was a solution to a problem that didn't exist because some European parliamentarian was told to check in his bag or something about two years ago. It is nonsense. There's more daft regulation coming out of the home of daft regulations in Brussels.

I mean, again, it's another stupid regulation out of the European Union. We have said, look, we'd never charge for the children sitting with a parent, but if the parent wants to select a seat, which they clearly have to do, everybody who chooses a seat on board Ryanair, you can choose a 3 euro seat in the middle to back of the aircraft. Most parents I know choose to sit up in the front with their children where they pay. Now, what we've said, the European, oh no, that's against the law. Parents traveling with children must have a free seat. Okay, they can have a free seat. They can have it down in the 3 euro section. Most parents actually will not want to travel down in the 3 euro section, but that'll be free and they will choose now to move to the front of the aircraft or to the overwing exit where they have more space and they will happily pay for themselves and the children. So it's again another stupid regulation from people who don't understand what's going on in the real world of air travel. Speaking personally as a parent of four teenagers, I would happily pay to have my children sitting as far away from me as possible on board the aircraft. Again, look, Europe has a huge and the UK, we have a new government here. We need to be competitive. We need to get our economies back growing again. And the way to do that is to lower the cost of air travel. We were the first people to start charging for bags 10, 15 years ago. And it has transformed the economics of air travel. In the old days, everybody had two bags. You arrived at the airport, you stood in a long queue to hand check over your bags, someone gave you a piece of paper so they could take your bags to give it to you on the arrival airport. Unless of course you were flying with some of our competitors, you'd never see your bag again. We got rid of all that crap 15 years ago when you could start checking in online. The only benefit of checking in online is don't bring any bags and then you have this wonderful experience. You arrive at the airport, you don't have to queue at a check-in desk. You go straight through security. On arrival, you don't have to hang around a bloody carousel looking at all the other morons standing at the carousel waiting for their bag, unless you flew BA in which case you'll never see your bag again. Air travelers have become liberated by getting rid of these stupid bags. Airport security is a much faster experience at any Ryanair airport because we aggressively limit the amount of free carry-on bags. You go through an American airport, they're pulling bags off, they're strapping bags, it takes forever to get through security. You go to Stansted, you go to Gatwick, straight through security because people are not carrying ridiculous amounts of carry-on baggage. This is the way forward and that is why we carried last year, 28 million people chose to fly with Ryanair. And a couple of dumb bureaucrats in Brussels think they know better. No, we don't.

I don't think anything at all. The only poll that matters is on election day. This year, Ryanair will carry 216 million passengers. EasyJet, which is a very good but expensive airline, will carry about 100 million passengers. We out carry them more than 2 to 1. So, I don't have any difficulty with people expressing preferences at polls. There's probably people out there who think Farage is the future for the UK economy despite the abject failure of Brexit. Look, when people come to fly, 99.99% of people want to know what's the cheapest airfare and they book and travel Ryanair. Do we satisfy everybody? Absolutely not. Do we piss some people off? Of course we do. But day after day in market after market, we out carry and out compete EasyJet, Wizz Air, BA, everybody. People will choose Ryanair. And as long as they keep choosing Ryanair, we'll keep doing what we do.

I don't think they're great. If you look at the announcements yesterday, it was all back to the future nonsense. That the last 40 years have been a mistake. You should have been in the UK here in the 60s and 70s when the IMF were running the economy, rubbish piling high in the streets, and it was the sick man of Europe. The last government got elected, Starmer and Rachel Reeves, we got elected, we're going to deliver growth, growth. I wrote to Rachel Reeves sent her two letters. The way to deliver growth here, one of the things you should do is abolish APD. You have this ludicrous 15 pound tax on air travel on and off an island on the periphery of Europe. If you really believe in growth, abolish APD and stand back while there's an invasion of visitors and tourists coming here, not just to London, but to airports all over the UK. I got back some stupid letter from the Treasury signed by James Murray, who should have known better. Oh, £15 APD is only 1% of the average economy airfare. I mean, clearly he's never flown with any other than BA or something. I had to send him back an explanation how to do maths. Our average airfare is 45 quid. £15 APD is 33% rate of tax on that. And I sent this back and said, 'You clearly don't live in the real world.' He never replied. He got sent off to the health department. But this is the kind of stupidity you're dealing with in treasury orthodoxy. None of them have a clue how to deliver growth. If Europe or the UK wants to deliver growth, start with air travel. Air travel drives tourism and economic activity. It fills hotels, it fills restaurants. And we in the UK have this stupid policy of taxing people when they choose to travel. That's why so many people avoid the UK now. You can avoid the 15 pound APD by traveling somewhere else in Europe. Scrap APD and stand back and watch real growth get delivered here instantaneously.

Well, good luck with that as you try to get to your holidays in Portugal or Spain or Italy. Look, the environmental lobby have fundamentally lost this argument. For all the pious pie in the sky nonsense, you still live on an island on the periphery of Europe. The only way on and off that island for millions of people is air travel. Yes, we do need to decarbonize air travel, but we're doing that by investing in new aircraft technology that burns 40% less fuel per passenger. Taxing people to come on and off this island is not the way forward. And I would point to the environmental lobby: go to Sweden, the home of Greta Thunberg, the home of flight shaming and all that nonsense a decade ago. Students who should have spent more time in school instead of out there mitching school protesting. They have a new transport minister up there. They've abolished aviation taxes. They're reducing ATC fees and our airport Stockholm is one of the fastest growing airports in Europe this year. Taxing air travel just sends the business to a competitor country somewhere else. Abolishing air tax on air travel, which is what you should do, brings loads of new routes, traffic, visitors to your country, and that's what the UK needs to do. So if Andy Burnham is serious about growth, although I didn't hear any mention of growth in his speech, he was going on about solving homelessness. We didn't elect people here to solve homelessness. Homelessness in a country of 60 million people is a tragedy, but it will always be with us. You may as well try and solve drug use or the war on drugs has been equally unsuccessful. Deliver growth. That's what you got elected to do. When the election comes around in 3 years time, people will vote based on the economy and how it's doing. And if all you're going to come up with is nonsense about homelessness and putting a cap of two quid on bus fares instead of three quid on buses, you're not going to deliver growth. You're going to deliver more chaos.

I have an objection to the French air traffic control, which is about the most, even by French standards, inefficient and badly run. But I don't necessarily blame the French. This is a European Union competence or useless Ursula von der Leyen, who is the president of the European Commission. She keeps making speeches about making Europe more competitive. Ultimately, why did the Brexit vote succeed? Because Europe didn't do enough for its citizens. I campaigned on the Brexit vote because I thought low fare air travel, apart from roaming charges, and what had Europe done for us? Now, Brexit has proven to be an economic disaster. The UK economy is in a mess. I don't believe the UK should rejoin the European Union, but it certainly needs a trade deal with Europe ASAP. And you need to create more freedom of movement for young people between the UK and Europe. But French air traffic control should be sorted out by the European Commission. You cannot have a single market across Europe where you allow a tiny, there are only about 300 or 3,000 French air traffic controllers, they can close the skies over Europe as they do on a regular basis during June, July, and August. We don't allow the roads to be closed. We don't allow the seas to be closed. But a couple of French air traffic controllers decide they don't want to show up to work on a Saturday morning, the skies are closed. It is nonsense. There are two simple requirements that the airlines are calling for. One, air traffic controllers should be fully staffed for the first wave of morning flights and have standby air traffic controllers in place if somebody calls in sick. They don't even do that. And two, when the French go on their recreational striking as they do every summer, keep the skies over France open. We don't need French air traffic controllers to overfly France. The Spanish, the Germans, the Irish, the UK air traffic control can do that, manage the overflights. But of course, useless von der Leyen can't even manage that. She's too busy going around giving speeches about making Europe competitive to actually do anything useful about it.

Well, firstly, it was a very traumatic incident for our crews and for all the passengers who were on board the aircraft. This was a window shattered, the aircraft, all the oxygen masks came down, the pilots immediately took the aircraft steeply down to a non-pressurized altitude. So it is a very upsetting, traumatic experience for everybody on board. We are very sorry for the passenger who was seated in row 11F. He did not, however, get sucked out the window, and all of these kind of nonsensical claims. He did suffer a trauma. Our crews looked after him incredibly well. Once the aircraft had gone, everybody in a depressurization has to get into a seat and put the seat belt on and the oxygen mask on. So claims coming from his lawyer that the crews were terrible, they didn't look after him, are false. I heard his wife was holding on to his legs. His wife claims to have been holding on to his legs. But they all went through a trauma. Our crews did a phenomenal job handling, getting the plane down to a safe altitude. Once they were at safe altitude, our cabin crew moved the passenger together with his wife and sat them in an empty row of seats together with a doctor on board who looked after them all the way prior to landing in Thessaloniki. But they've hired lawyers and the lawyers are making more claims by the day. We'll deal with that in due course. Dealing with the accident, it is now being investigated by the NTSB, which we think is the right place. The American National Transport Safety Board has experience of these types of incidents. What was unusual about this is that something has come loose, an engine fan blade or something came off the engine. In almost all cases, the aircraft are designed that if something comes loose, it goes through the engine out the back. In this case, it appears to have come out the front of the engine. It looks like it hit the fuselage of the aircraft. It didn't hit the window, but it hit the fuselage of the aircraft. There are cuts in the skin of the aircraft, and we don't yet know how or why the one window blew out and the aircraft depressurized. As in all of these cases in air safety, they are investigated independently. The NTSB will issue a draft report within 28 days. Then there will be a full report. We are cooperating fully with that investigation. They've had access to the planes, our engineers. We have OFDM, Formula 1 telemetry on all these aircraft, and we've provided all that to them. So we like everybody else should await the outcome of the independent report. We'll have an outline report in 28 days. And if this passenger's Greek lawyers want to make outlandish claims as they've been making in recent days, we'll deal with that in due course.

No. The plane was in the climb. He had his seat belt fastened as did every other passenger. If your seat belt is fastened, you are not going to be sucked out of the window of an aircraft. The windows are not that big in any event. Now, did he get pulled towards the window? Absolutely. Did he suffer a traumatic experience? Absolutely. But these lurid stories that his head and his torso were out the window and he was only saved by his wife holding on to his ankles are just lurid claims. We should all await the outcome of the report. The report will tell us exactly what happened, and we will in due course be meeting with him and his lawyers when the various compensation claims are submitted.

Yeah. There were two of them previously in the US I think with Southwest Airlines. And I don't think there's any, the message that we take from this is that Ryanair operates about 3,000, nearly 4,000 flights daily. So this is a very rare occasion. But it emphasizes once again, when we make these announcements, please keep your seat belt securely fastened on you at all times unless you're going to the toilet. Please keep that, that's why we produce these safety announcements. Follow the safety announcements, and thankfully this passenger did in this case and that is what saved him.

Sure, no problem with it. I mean, we very few passengers on board our aircraft would buy more than two drinks anyway. But if the quid pro quo was the airlines limited to two drinks, done in a heartbeat. The real issue we have, and we have to recognize it's an industry problem of misbehavior, and the misbehavior is getting worse. Particularly during periods of flight delays, people sitting in airports consuming copious amounts of alcohol. They say, why don't you just stop them on boarding? It is very hard to identify unless they are staggeringly drunk, unless they can't stand up straight. Most people, even drunks, can pass through, show your passport and get on board. And you have a combination of alcohol and drugs and they get aggressive and argumentative. In the old days, if you drank too much, you just fell asleep on board the plane. So it is a real challenge. It continues to be a mystery to me why pubs at airports are allowed to open at 6:00 a.m. serving alcohol. Why not serve tea and coffees until 11:00 or 12:00 in the afternoon? But the critical thing here is we limit the amount of duty-free people can buy to, you show your boarding pass and you leave. Why don't we do the same with alcoholic drinks at bars? Tim Martin of Wetherspoons doesn't care because the airlines, they pass the problem on to the airline. The airports don't care. They just pass the problem onto the airlines. And the poor old dumb airlines are there diverting planes. It causes real upset to fellow passengers on board when you have aggressive people shouting and screaming and drunk and disrupting our crews. Our crews shouldn't have to work in that environment, and our fellow passengers deserve the respect that airports will not be shoveling alcohol into these people, particularly during flight delays, copious amounts of alcohol, so that they can misbehave.

No. Longhaul is fundamentally different for two reasons. One, quick turnarounds will make no difference. If you turn the plane around in 25 minutes or 3 hours in JFK, you still only get two flights per day per aircraft. And in longhaul, as the legacy airlines have now discovered, you can charge almost anything you like for business class and first class travel, and you can afford to sell the economy seats basically free, for one quid if needs be, and you will still make money. I know because longhaul low cost, you can't get access to that premium travel. I don't believe longhaul low cost works.

I would like to get a job in a proper functioning industry, Greg. And that would exclude me from, there's no airline I would want to run other than Ryanair. Ryanair is by far and away the best airline in the world. We are transforming the way people fly. We are transforming the cost at which people fly. I have some children who are in college in Dublin at the moment. They've all gone off on this mythical interrailing holiday during the school holidays. Actually, it's interrailing, but none of the kids anymore bother getting a train if it's more than a two-hour train. They get a Ryanair flight. They'll limit themselves to two-hour train journeys.

I haven't laid out any retirement plans. I've extended my employment contract by agreeing with the board until 2032.

I would like to see Ryanair carrying something like close to 300 million passengers. I would hope, since I have performance targets built into my contract, I'd like to see it getting close to making 4 billion profit a year, and I'd like to see the share price somewhere north of 43 or 44, at which case I get some more share options if we hit those very ambitious targets. But fundamentally, that can only happen if we grow the fleet carefully by another 200 to 300 aircraft, keep airfares low at a time in Europe when I'm convinced Lufthansa, BA, Air France will be trying to drive up airfares. Many of our existing carriers, EasyJet, Wizz, will have been, not disappeared, but they'll have been bought out by the legacy guys, they'll be partners or part of the legacy guys. We will be the only good guys left in town in the early 2030s, offering low fare real competition and real choice over the high fare scammers who'll be trying to relieve you of the cost of your mortgage just to go on holidays with your family during the summer.

I suspect in the early 2030s they probably will. There's no doubt people would like to have Wi-Fi on board if it's free. If they have to pay for it, they won't use it. And I think the technology is changing so quickly. Our issue with Starlink or Wi-Fi at the moment is to put a big aerial on top of the fuselage. There's a fuel drag penalty of about 1 or 2% that costs us 10 to 20 million a year, and our passengers will not pay for it. But when the aerial technology improves so you can put it in the nose of the plane or the baggage hold or the rear galley, then I think we'll have free Wi-Fi on board, and that will be another income line or another ancillary revenue line for Ryanair which will help us to keep costs low and pass on even lower fares to our ever growing passenger base.

What do I do to relax and have fun? I send my family away on holidays. This is my holiday of the year. They've all gone down to the Algarve this week and next week. I'm going down next week. I take two weeks holidays a year, generally spent with the family. But I don't like holidays particularly. I find them irritating and wasteful. I would rather be working. What do I do to relax? I go and work in Ryanair. This is not a job, it's a vocation. I enjoy what we do. It's a great operation with a great team of people. And we are revolutionaries. We're changing the way air travel is perceived. When I grew up in the 60s and 70s, air travel was this exclusive, rich people went off on elegant holidays. Now, everybody can afford to go on a flight on Ryanair. Yes, it's a different experience. No, we're not taking all your suitcases or your bags. But it's a very democratized, affordable experience. And I love what we do in Ryanair. So, what do I do to relax? I go to work. Do I have tips for next year's Grand National? Back whatever Willie Mullins is running in it because he generally wins most of them.

Simon and Greg. Thank you very much and good continued success with the Telegraph Travel Podcast. It's a great operation. Well done.