From the Ryanair web site today:
Ryanair, the world’s favourite airline, today (5 Aug) announced that its passenger traffic grew by 19% in July 2009 to 6.7m passengers which is a new monthly traffic record for Europe’s largest low fares airline.
But at what cost to the industry as a whole? As far as Swissport is concerned they go after the business because they have an income to earn and shareholders to feed, even handling that bunch. Ryanair have made no secret of the fact that if they could get by without handling agents then they would. Many check in staff lost their jobs with the introduction of the much vaunted “self check-in system”, alot of good that was on the day! and Swissport had to adjust their business model accordingly to take the vagueries of this outfit into account. Staffing for handling these days is even more “knife edge” than in my time in handling, resulting in very little, if any, slack in the system, Ryanair should be aware of this. Rostering for the Ryanair operation must be a bloody nightmare. Sorry Andy, normally you and I are on common ground ref this confounded carrier but I don’t think
that in this case its right to label Swisport staff as monkeys, and as for getting to Carcassone for a few pence it might be as well to remember that it has cost some in our industry dear to enable that to happen…nothing personal.;) I can well remember sitting in in a negotiation with a based “low cost carrier” and the situation was that we were expected to tender to turn around a fully loaded 737-400 using 4 staff! In the real world it meant allocating a min of 5 to achieve that so person 5 was at our companies expense, so we would have been losing out from the start had our MD not decided that handing that carrier was just not worth it. I was also instructed by that carrier on many occasions to manipulate and alter the delay codes in movement messages so that our company was made to look responsible for the delay thereby incurring the dreaded penalty payments. I narrowly avoided a disciplinary hearing for refusing the airlines Station Managers requests to alter the codes until I proved what was going on to my senior management. I’ve seen this ‘Low Cost” scenario close up, and it stinks! Don’t use it.:mad:
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