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It looks like Ryanair have stopped offering cheap flights from Liverpool to Inverness for the upcoming winter season.

Ryanair are quite often very happy to say which routes don’t perform well, but this seems to be one they have let go of quietly. Unfortunately, when it comes to confirming these details, Ryanair’s website is one of the most cumbersome out there. There is no quick way of checking timetable details, so users have to scroll back and forth through the dates they are interested in finding flights for.

This is, I’m afraid, yet another example of Ryanair’s needless unhelpfulness. So in the time it takes me to write this blog, I have got as far as confirming that there are no flights between Wednesdays and Saturdays in November. OK - can now confirm this route doesn’t operate on any days in November. Checking back through Ryanair’s booking form confirms that these flights do indeed end on 26th October.

So, we can expect the usual questions about why a route which appears to have been popular, both with point to point travellers, and people making their own onward connections from Liverpool, has been axed.

Our understanding is that these flights were indeed relatively full. There is certainly room for competition on this route, as passengers who have got used to Ryanair’s cheap flights to Inverness will now have to make do with Eastern’s services from an alternative airport like Manchester or Birmingham.

The clue lies in the probable reason for Ryanair offering cheap Inverness flights in the first place. Budget airlines like Ryanair do everything they can to get the best usage out of their aircraft, and this process involves carefully matching up city combinations, so that each plane can perform a maximum number of “rotations” (out and back trips) in one day. Sometimes, the schedule results in a time slot of, let’s say, 2 1/2 hours, into which they need to fit a return trip.

We have always suspected that destinations like Inverness and Aberdeen suit Ryanair’s purposes in this respect very well. In the case of Ryanair’s Aberdeen flights, the “yields” (i.e. the revenue the airline earns for each passenger) seem notably above those for Inverness, so the route seems likely to stay - for the time being at least. In the case of Inverness, it looks like even if Ryanair were making money, they can now make more money by moving their aircraft around to serve other routes.

I have just got one of those consumer survey stories through, which claims that online consumers will turn immediately to a competitor if they read a bad review.  Of course, there is a great deal of truth in this, but any kind of press release on these issues needs to be backed by a bit of credibility.  The survey was done by the digital marketing agency Tamar, who are well known on the search engine industry circuit.  The problem is that a company like this has a clear agenda to sell “online reputation management solutions” to its clients, many of whom will bite at this kind of story.

The survey claims that if consumers really bad review when they are searching for a travel company by name, then 58% of them would book with an alternative provider, whereas 42% of them would stop their search session.  This seems to make the assumption that 100% of consumers who read a bad review will end up turning away from the travel company in question.  The survey then goes on to claim that:

 ”one of the most high-profile travel companies to suffer as a result of natural search results, reducing a plethora of negative reviews is budget airline Ryanair.”

If this claim were true, then surely, Ryanair would have already lost 100% of their business? For all the obvious reasons, Ryanair are still the black sheep amongst large swathes of the travel industry, be it online or offline — just as they are amongst numerous consumer groups, politicians and environmentalists. But just because the airline generates large quantities of negative publicity, does that mean that they should be worried?  Clearly, Ryanair’s incessant rise in passenger numbers suggests otherwise.

This does not mean that consumer reviews don’t have their place, but it does mean that expectations have to be managed.  People seem to love telling stories about Ryanair, whether they have flown with them or not.  Ryanair are the one airline to thrive on the age-old adage that no publicity is bad publicity.  The statistics however speak for themselves — Ryanair carry more passengers on more on-time flights than any other airline, and they also lose a few of their passengers’ bags in the process. 

So does this tell the whole story?  Not entirely — Ryanair tend to use airports which are much less congested, and therefore less prone to delays. Meanwhile, charging passengers to check their luggage in, and only operating point-to-point schedules, also ensures that they have far fewer opportunities to lose bags, compared to network carriers like British Airways.

Would I recommend flying with Ryanair, given a like-for-like comparison on the same route?  Such direct comparisons are very difficult to make, as there are very few examples of Ryanair operating flights directly against a competitor — i.e. from the same departure airport to the same arrival airport.  I can reach the check-in desks of either Birmingham or Coventry airport within 15 minutes of leaving my house, and as neither these are Ryanair strongholds, their rivals tend to start with a significant advantage.  If I’m trying to get to somewhere a little bit more adventurous (both Coventry and Birmingham still offer a pretty conservative choice of destinations, although Birmingham is looking a lot more interesting this summer), then I would look briefly at flights from East Midlands airport, before considering flying from London. 

The last time I flew with Ryanair was just over a year ago, when I went with a friend to Palermo in Sicily.  On that particular occasion, Ryanair were the only airline flying there, and as the friend in question not only lives within 30 minutes’ drive of Stansted, but also gets free parking there, the choice of departure airport wasn’t really an issue either.

Ultimately, I’ll always pay a bit extra to use more convenient airport, and to know that I can reserve a window seat at check-in.  Much as though I think reliability is important, Ryanair’s punctuality can also be counterbalanced by the fact that they generally operate a much lower frequency of flights, and provide very little assistance when things do go wrong.

So should Michael O’Leary be quaking in his boots because Flightmapping says that Ryanair are a long way from being our favourite airline? We very much doubt it — our whole point in existence is to provide route information about which airlines offer flights to which destinations. Any commentary that we provide is always going to lean towards the most direct option, whereas Ryanair are more likely to take you to a field in the middle of nowhere. 

One mantra that Ryanair repeatedly spew out is that lowest cost always wins.  This might well be true for the vast majority of passengers, but this site has always been much more focused on providing information for people who know where they want to go, and who will value finding the most direct way of getting there above the price they have to pay. 

This doesn’t mean that we don’t think the price is important, it is just that we like to look at the whole picture, instead of just the baseline cost, which can often be so misleading anyway.  Fortunately for Ryanair, most people don’t think that way, so even if I had decided to go on a massive tirade against them, they would have still filled another load of flights in the time you read this article!