Following the high response to my recent article on AI’s impact on travel, I wanted to expand on my reasons why I believe Ryanair will not succeed in the package holiday market. Steve’s compelling case for Ryanair acquiring major OTAs, such as On the Beach, makes perfect financial sense. His data is irrefutable. However, I believe Steve’s analysis, whilst mathematically sound, overlooks a fundamental barrier that no amount of clever acquisition strategy can overcome: Ryanair’s toxic brand DNA.
Budget Airline Growth Imperative and Its Limits
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby recently stated that the traditional budget airline business model is “dead” because it relies on unsustainable growth and deceptive pricing practices. He argues these airlines, after achieving a certain size, struggle to maintain repeat business due to prioritising cost-cutting over customer satisfaction and failing to deliver consistent service or value. This growth imperative is precisely what drives Steve’s consolidation thesis. When you can no longer grow by adding routes or frequency, horizontal expansion into higher-margin products, such as holidays, becomes the obvious next step.
The mathematics are compelling: EasyJet generates £73.08 profit per holiday passenger versus £13.42 for flight-only customers. For any growth-hungry low-cost carrier, those numbers represent an irresistible opportunity. But here’s where Steve and I fundamentally disagree: operational capability and financial logic mean nothing if your brand actively repels the very customers you’re trying to attract.
The Brand Reality: More Than Just a Logo
A brand isn’t simply a logo or colour scheme; it’s the cumulative impression formed through every customer touchpoint, shaped by the tone of voice set by company leaders who craft the company’s culture. When senior executives regularly espouse that customers should consider themselves fortunate to access cheap air travel and stop complaining about comfort, safety, or experience, that attitude permeates the entire organisation.
Ryanair’s leadership has spent decades cultivating a culture that views customer service as an unnecessary expense and customer complaints as a source of comedy. This isn’t an operational choice; it’s become their brand identity. When your CEO famously suggests charging passengers to use the toilet, when your social media team mocks legitimate customer concerns, when your entire corporate philosophy centres on extracting maximum revenue whilst providing minimum service, you’re not just running an airline – you’re building a brand that screams “we don’t care about your experience.”
This approach worked brilliantly when Ryanair was purely a transport utility. A £29 flight from London to Dublin is a commodity purchase – get me there cheaply, and I’ll tolerate the experience. But holidays aren’t commodity purchases, particularly for families.
The Family Market: Where Trust Matters Most
To succeed in package holidays, you must win the hearts and minds of families, and this is where Ryanair’s brand toxicity becomes a fatal flaw. Consider the typical family travel experience with Ryanair: you’ve risen at an ungodly hour to catch your flight, the children are half-asleep and wholly grumpy. You’ve packed for every conceivable situation, making you nervous about baggage weight limits and the prospect of needing a second mortgage to cover excess charges.
You arrive at the airport with two child buggies and multiple bags, all while adhering to strict size restrictions enforced by the infamous “bag police” at the departure gate. Your children’s comfort toys are constantly being dropped as you rush to reach the gate. When boarding is called, there’s no priority for families with small children unless you’ve paid for speedy boarding, which typically means boarding the bus first, disembarking last, and being among the final passengers to reach your seats.
Then you discover your “nearby” destination actually requires a four-hour coach transfer, and your accommodation has received the full Ryanair treatment: bring your own bedsheets, towels, toilet roll, and cutlery. When you finally reach your room and open the curtains expecting the view that justified all this hassle, you find yourself five kilometres from the sea you thought you’d paid to overlook.
Post a complaint on social media, and expect this kind of response from Ryanair’s social team: “We appreciate you paid extra for a sea view, but it’s not our fault you didn’t bring the Hubble Telescope to see it!”
The Trust Equation
Families will trust Ryanair with flight seats costing a few hundred pounds because they understand the value proposition: cheap transport from A to B, with service to match. But they will never trust Ryanair with their hard-fought savings of several thousand pounds for what should be their best week of the year. The brand perception Ryanair has cultivated, through deliberate choice, makes this impossible.
This matters because brand communications function like pieces of an elaborate puzzle, forming a picture in customers’ minds over time. Individual posts or interactions rarely build entire customer perceptions, but cumulative exposure to repeated messages of a particular tone, especially on social media, which reaches customers more than any other touchpoint, absolutely does.
The Social Media Amplification Effect
We’re currently witnessing a trend in marketing that worships insignificant content: social posts and videos that have no meaning, often poking fun at customers, staff, or specific generations. This content serves no purpose beyond generating attention for its own sake. It’s history repeating itself. Those who thought Ryanair was clever, mocking customers on Twitter, are now seeing firsthand how this strategy plays out in the long term.
If your brand follows TikTok trends with little relevance to your actual value proposition, how will you be perceived in five years’ time? It’s taken twenty years for Ryanair’s approach to reach a point where it’s beginning to haunt them. In our AI-accelerated world, that timeline compresses to perhaps two years.
The Ryanair Precedent: A Cautionary Tale
Ryanair’s situation should serve as a case study for every brand: thinking you’re being clever by mocking clients, leveraging customer feedback for giggles, or remaining completely oblivious to your customers’ experience will ultimately limit your business capabilities. Worse still, it may end in disaster.
Social media communication must always be carefully considered. It must form part of a wider strategy that brings to life how your product or service addresses the problems of your target audience. Every post, every response, every interaction should reinforce the brand promise and build trust with the customers you’re trying to serve.
Why This Matters for the Industry
Steve’s consolidation vision remains financially sound. The numbers don’t lie about holiday profitability versus flight-only margins. But Ryanair’s brand DNA makes them uniquely unsuited to capitalise on this opportunity, regardless of which OTA they might acquire. Their decades of deliberate customer antagonism have created a trust deficit that no amount of operational integration can overcome.
This doesn’t invalidate the broader consolidation trend Steve identifies. EasyJet Holidays succeeds precisely because EasyJet, despite being a low-cost carrier, maintained a brand voice that didn’t actively alienate customers. Jet2’s success in the holiday market stems from its similar brand positioning, being efficient and value-focused without being contemptuous of customer needs.
The Broader Lesson
Ryanair’s predicament illustrates a fundamental business truth: short-term tactical wins in brand communication can create long-term strategic limitations. Their decision to build a brand around customer antagonism worked brilliantly for their core market but has now erected insurmountable barriers to expansion into higher-value segments.
As we debate the future of travel on our upcoming podcast, this distinction will be crucial. Financial logic alone doesn’t determine strategic success. Brand perception and customer trust remain the ultimate arbiters of which companies can credibly expand into new markets.
The travel industry’s future will indeed be shaped by consolidation and AI disruption, as both Steve and I agree. But success will belong to companies that understand the difference between being operationally capable and being trusted with customers’ most precious commodity: their holidays.
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