Readers like you keep news free for everyone.
More than 5,000 readers have already pitched in to keep free access to The Journal.
For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can help keep paywalls away.
# customer service
'Warm and cuddly' or 'harsh and caustic': Are we seeing Michael O'Leary 2.0?
The Ryanair boss was prompted to reintroduce pre-booked seats after travelling with his own family.
ARE WE SEEING Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary turn over a new leaf?
At this morning’s job announcement, he said the company had been “slightly misunderstood” over the years, and the recent measures to improve customer service is an act of “returning to core fundamentals”.
He added that he himself has been misunderstood, and that people close to him will know that he is “warm, soft, and cuddly” — and he’ll even be dressing up as Santa at Christmas.
New measures to be introduced include a redesigned website allowing a flight to booked in five clicks and with the ability to save all your details for future use, and the reintroduction of pre-booked seats.
Passengers were unable to prebook seats due to the amount of time it would take to remove bags from a plane if a passenger didn’t turn up to a flight.
“Since we started charging for checked-in bags five years ago, now only 20 per cent of passengers have a checked-in bag,” O’Leary said, “So there’s only a one-in-five chance that the passenger showing up late to the gate will have a checked-in bag, and if we have to go and get it off, there’s only thirty or forty bags in the hold”.
And another factor that prompted this decision? His own children.
Read: Ryanair announces 300 new jobs >
More: Ryanair to allocate seats on flights from February >
