Ryanair Lets You Choose Their Next Surcharge

By | March 12, 2009

We got a note of this over Twittercheck us out there

Ryanair today invited passengers to suggest the next ancillary revenue idea after their CEO confirmed that they might institute pay toilets.

Ryanair’s Stephen McNamara said;

“Ryanair is Europe’s largest low fares airline and we plan to continue to reduce costs and fares by stimulating ancillary revenues. We have always provided passengers with choice, if you don’t want to pay for food – don’t buy it, if you don’t want to pay checked in bag charges – don’t bring checked in bags, if you don’t want to pay handling charges – then just use Visa Electron entirely  free of charge.
Since we confirmed that we are considering a toilet charge we have received a huge number of ancillary revenue suggestions from passengers and we want more. We are asking passengers to submit their ideas with the most creative winning €1,000 cash. Some of the best suggests to date are:

Charging for toilet paper – with O’Leary’s face on it,
Charging €2.50 to read the safety cards,
Charging €1 to use oxygen masks
Charging €25 to use the emergency exit,
Charging €50 for bikini clad Cabin Crew.

Now, Ryanair is offering a Europe-wide competition with a cash prize of 1000 euro($1261) for their most ingenious, wacky, and creative ideas for new fees. Passengers can submit their ideas to competition@ryanair.com to enter before March 30th. We predict several things for this.

  • It’s an April Fool’s Joke, which is why they’ll want their answers before the end of the month. Think they’ll try to get out of giving someone the money?
  • If anyone sends in an idea they think they can get away with, they’ll use it, even if it doesn’t win.
  • Ryanair is surprisingly good at marketing. Their tasteless stunts attract attention. They’ll launch a sale with this at some point.

Either way, our entry, if we were eligible, is a fee one can pay for a premium service where the passenger is treated in accordance with EU Regulations, and guaranteed that if they are dumped in a field and abandoned, they are given the money mandated by those regulations.  What a wacky concept.

What do you think? Comments are always appreciated.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Author: Guru

Guru is the Editor of Flight Wisdom and a long time aviation enthusiast.