We are all Sun Kings with Ryanair

Michael O’Leary has done more for British people than any politician

Waiting by the boarding gate in Stansted Airport earlier this year, and an oldish man sitting with three friends gets hauled over by a woman in a garish yellow and blue outfit. He is asked to fit his bag inside the measuring box; it’s clearly too big, and he has to fork out £70, which he does without complaint. A few minutes later and another person gets it.

I anxiously feel my own rucksack, which probably can’t fit under the seat but is nowhere near as obviously oversized as those two. I chose it carefully, and this time I pass through without a charge, and even get to put the thing in the overhead locker, despite the sign saying it’s *only* for premium passengers. Take that, O’Leary! A small victory against the Ryanair boss - but then I consider every flight to be a personal battle between O’Leary and me. Others have their own way of beating the airline company, such as the man who wore all his clothes onto a flight to avoid paying extra.

Michael O’Leary is a controversial figure, I suppose it’s fair to say. Last year he was even pied by environmentalists in Belgium (the Belgians, for some inexplicable reason, have a long tradition of doing this and, like mime, I suppose we will never understand why.) Afterwards, Ryanair’s Twitter account announced that ‘passengers [are] so happy with our routes and petition that they’re celebrating with cake’.

The company’s Twitter and TikTok accounts are famous for their clever use of humour, but unlike many corporations which employ a form of twee that jars with their service levels, Ryanair are incredibly effective.

Indeed it’s arguable that RyanAir boss Michael O’Leary has done more to improve the happiness of younger British people than any politician of the last few decades. He absolutely deserves his salary.

Whenever I go to Stansted, I marvel at the corner with the Ryanair gates where you'll see hundreds of people from all classes of society flying across the continent at minimal cost, a luxury that would be not just impossible but inconceivable to almost all of their grandparents at that age. Such abundance is genuinely moving, and living proof of Steven Pinker or Matt Ridley’s argument that human existence has got progressively better.

I used to particularly dislike the Ryanair experience partly because of a fear of flying, which I’ve largely suppressed now, and budget airlines would make me more nervous, being more stressful, full of people and noise.

As flying has become more affordable, and more popular, it has naturally become more unpleasant, but that’s not a bad thing. Occasionally one of those traditionalist Twitter accounts will share an image of ‘this is how flying used to be’, showing a man being presented with fine dining while laying back in a large chair and smoking a cigar (and the air stewardesses are all hot obviously). Maybe, but the cost of the flight would have been wildly out of the reach of most people.

Ryanair certainly isn’t, and in the past year, for example, I have flown to Carcassonne for less than £25 and to Katowice for £36, while a trip to Spain for a family of five in peak summer season was less than £500. One flight cost £9, I seem to remember. As Ridley put it, ‘You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis [XIV] never dreamed of seeing.’ We are all sun kings.

Ryanair is the busiest airline in Europe, with over 3,000 flights a day It also makes a profit of £120 a second, and as this explainer in the Pimlico Journal outlined. ‘This business model was not dreamt up out of sadistic glee’.

It is able to make flying so cheap because it ‘largely just charges you for behaviours that are expensive for them to cater for. Charging to use the check-in desks is an obvious cost saver because if all the customers use the app, you don’t have to pay anyone to man the check-in desk, where staff do little else but use the app for the customer. The real game-changer is getting customers to stop bringing baggage by charging them for it. Ryanair (and their little brother WizzAir) thrash the competition in short-haul European flights by turning their jets around faster than anyone else. By emptying and re-loading their planes in twenty-five minutes rather than an hour, as is typical for lackadaisical flag carriers, Ryanair saves two hours every four flights, meaning they have two more hours to fly some more customers.’

Ryanair has also earned its notoriety in part as a public relations strategy, with O’Leary occasionally announcing plans for absurd new charges, such as making people pay to go to the toilet. And each time these stories appear in the papers, the report will also mention that you can currently get to Dubrovnik or whatever for just £12 . He once said that he’d like to have standing room on planes, were it not for the authorities, and these tickets would cost between £1 and £5.

This adds to the gaiety of the nation, but it has more serious consequences, and as James Marriott wrote a few months back, Ryanair has been his generation’s grand tour.

The glamour and cultural significance of cheap air travel has been much underrated… Low-cost access to Europe was a defining experience of my early adulthood. Rent was unaffordable, the housing ladder unscalable and the political situation louring. The chance to fly to Venice for 45 quid seemed rare proof of progress. My mum may have bought a flat in her early twenties, but only the wealthiest students of her generation travelled to Italy every summer — something I did on the proceeds of a holiday job and the leftovers of my student loan.

The deplorable aspects of mass tourism have been rehearsed many times elsewhere. I agree with all the obvious criticisms. But much fretting over the problem contains a measure of snobbery (are we going to restrict access to Venice to a handful of appropriately Byronic aristocrats?) as well as the English tourist’s traditional contempt for other English tourists — that unbanishable conviction that one’s own holidays are infinitely more authentic than those undertaken by the pink, waddling hordes on the other side of the piazza.

The lack of enthusiasm for Brexit among the young has more than a little to do with their coming of age in an era of cheap flights to Europe. That international outlook may yet prove a helpful prophylactic against the nationalism that is rising across the modern world.

Indeed, I wonder to what extent the company played a role in Britain’s increasing Europhilia during the 1990s, a period when foreign travel among Britons hugely increased.

The British are perhaps the most intrepid travellers in the world, and begun the modern concept of tourism first with the Grand Tours, followed by the arrival of middle-class tourism to France after the Battle of Waterloo. They have also famously felt their social class more intensely overseas, which grew as package holidays became available to the masses. Conscious of the often raucous behaviour of the lower orders, the English gentry abroad always try to distance themselves from their compatriots, a theme that runs from E.M. Forster to R.S. Archer.

Budget airlines carry none of the kudos of travel. In his Theory of a Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen wrote that: ‘What is common is within the (pecuniary) reach of many people. Its consumption is therefore not honorific, since it does not serve the purpose of a favourable invidious comparison with other consumers. Hence the consumption, or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an odious suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that is extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of sensibility.’

I’d feel hypocritical in arguing that anti-Ryanairism is about snobbery, because I’d obviously much rather be flying with a bunch of rich people with plenty of space in comfort, and I don’t actually want to be on a plane with a stag do. I just can’t afford to. Flying is an ordeal, and flying budget airlines is more so; but it’s an ordeal that takes two hours and for minimal cost will allow you to imagine yourself as a decadent aristocrat making his way through Italy.

In some cases travel might expand people’s horizons, but in many it clearly doesn’t, yet it still allows huge numbers of people to enjoy the warm glow of the Mediterranean - and that’s a good thing in itself. And if you occasionally get caught out by the Big Bag Police, well, that’s a small price to pay for such abundance.