Michael,
Last week’s PR stunt about charging passengers to use your toilets was well executed, but why go to all this effort to bring people to your website when you are then carrying adverts for your rivals through Google’s AdSense programme? If I was a Ryanair shareholder, I would certainly want to know why your website carries adverts for airlines like easyJet, your biggest competitor. Even if the numbers of people who switched to easyJet were small, you would still be wasting valuable revenue by giving your customers the opportunity to click away elsewhere and put their bums on Easyjet’s seats instead of yours.
Surely it makes no sense at all to accept adverts in this way, and it shouldn’t take a lunatic blogger to tell you that. Last week, it was suggested that you would charge people a pound to spend a penny, but this week you are earning pennies to lose pounds.
Yours sincerely
James Avery
Three words: Competitive Ad Filter
Comment by Martino — March 3, 2009 @ 9:36 am
I have to say I am surprised Ryanair even have these adverts on their pages. Especially within the booking process on their site. It really shows they do sometimes slip up.
Imagine Easyjet’s joy if they ended up getting even 1 booking DIRECTLY from Ryanair’ website.
quite remarkable.
Comment by kidlewis — March 3, 2009 @ 9:43 am
I’m sure O’Leary would simply say that this doesn’t worry him at all because people will always choose Ryanair anyway because they are so cheap yak yak yak etc.
Comment by Bernard Curry — March 3, 2009 @ 10:03 am
Well, it looks like travel industry blog Travolution has already looked into this, and got the following response:
“Google asked Ryanair if we wanted to have the advertising on our site restricted and we said absolutely not - these ads help to remind passengers that Ryanair offer the lowest fares in Europe and what a great deal they are getting with Ryanair.
“No other airline can beat Ryanair’s………….” etc, etc.
You have to laugh sometimes…
http://www.travolution.co.uk/blog/2009/02/why-ryanair-has-a-sense-a-humo.php
Comment by ja — March 3, 2009 @ 10:17 am
Michael O’Leary’s full of it sometimes isn’t he? If the adverts didn’t pull clicks, then he’d be dropped by Adsense. So they DO pull clicks, so his motive is Adsense revenue, not “reminding passengers that Raynair is cheaper”.
Own goal for whom… RyanAir or Easyjet? The ONLY person that can work this out is Easyjet, because (if they had a really cool PPC management company… and I know one near Luton) They would be able to see the revenue generated from adverts on RyanAir’s site. RyanAir can only see how much money it generates from Easyjet from their share of the click revenue. Easyjet should be in the driving seat here - but only if their campaigns are set up correctly.
I assume someone at RyanAir has been given the “target” of monetizing the website. Someone at Easyjet has been given the target of winning market share off of Ryan Air.
Both are probably working to different timescales.
It would make a very interesting case study - but only Easyjet has access to the numbers that will count. The best RyanAir can do is assess what business they may have given away (if any) based on the clicks sent to Easyjet. If it’s less that 1000 a month then I suspect Ryanair are winning… but only to the tune of the toilet entrance fees at best!
If it’s more that a 1,000 a month, then Easyjet is probably generating adcopy that has the ability to drag a user from Ryanair into sales for Easyjet. They don’t need many for that to be of considerable worth.
Dixon.
Comment by Dixon Jones — March 4, 2009 @ 7:54 am
The Ryanair line is that they DID have the option of an “exclude all competitors” filter, but CHOSE not to use it.
They can, of course, switch it off at any time, but I quietly suspect that they are happy for a few more lunatic bloggers to twitter away and give them even more free publicity.
I think that’s got to be all I’ve got to say on the matter!
Comment by ja — March 4, 2009 @ 8:00 am
When will Michael O’Leary “wise up” and start charging passengers according to their weight?
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