soundbites
Michael O’Leary Soundbites
Image from Crispin Rodwell
Love him or hate him, you have to admit if there’s one thing Michael O’Leary (Chief Exec of Ryanair) knows how to do, that’s deliver a sound bite. I’ve got some classics which I’m posting since Ryanair are in the news for supposedly abusing a blogger today. These quotes used to be on his wikipedia page but they seem to have been edited out, so I dug them out of the history and placed them here for prosperity’s sake.
- “For years flying has been the preserve of rich fuckers. Now everyone can afford to fly.”
- “Screw the travel agents. Take the fuckers out and shoot them. What have they done for passengers over the years?”
- On refunds “we don’t fall over ourselves if they say my granny fell ill. What part of no-refund do you not understand? You are not getting a refund so *** off”
- On Lufthansa: “Weber (Chairman Lufthansa Supervisory Board) says Germans don’t like low fares. How the *** does he know? The Germans will crawl ***-naked over broken glass to get them”
- On rivalry with British Airways: “There’s too much ‘we really admire our competitors’. All bollocks. Everyone wants to kick the *** out of everyone else. We want to beat the crap out of BA. They mean to kick the crap out of us.”
- On the Polish market: “Who wants to go to Gdansk? There ain’t a lot there after you’ve seen the shipyard wall.”
- Being happy: “They don’t call us the fighting Irish for nothing. We have always been the travel innovators of Europe. We’ve built the roads and laid the railways. Now its the airlines!”
- On environmentalists ““I’m always actually very pleasant, but don’t believe in trotting out all that PC claptrap just not to upset a couple of f***ing environmental lunatics. They are just loons.”
- His ultimate goal: “Free tickets. In a decade or so, airlines will pay travellers to distribute people around Europe. The airline industry is like Tesco, Ikea, or network television where viewers watch for nothing and advertisers pay for access to them. Web companies earn money when they deliver click traffic to other sites.”
- On the slightly wider Airbus A320 fuselage: “I’ve heard a lot of horseshit about a wider fuselage. I’ve yet in 15 years in this industry to meet one passenger who booked his ticket based on that. The seats have been wide enough and the aisles have been wide enough for passengers”
