No Joke: Ryanair May Offer Free Flights Soon

If you haven’t flown them yet, Ryanair is one of Europe’s best/worst discount airlines. Sure, you can fly between capital cities for $15 — but the amenities are on par with a prison waiting room (read: none) and you’ll pay for anything you need (like checking a bag). Still, though: $15.

Now, Michael O’Leary, the airline’s controversial CEO who once advocated factoring passengers’ weight into their fare, is back in the news with a new plan to discount tickets — down to literally nothing. Oddly enough, the gambit might actually work.

Ryanair keeps its costs low by landing at second- (or third-) choice airports — you won’t fly to Paris via Charles de Gaulle on Ryanair (equivalent: JFK), or even Orly (equivalent: Newark), but Beauvais (equivalent: a barn in the middle of a field). Those airports love the foot traffic, through their gates and retail shops, and they charge airlines like Ryanair a per-passenger fee to handle the foot traffic — but they could waive that fee if Ryanair made it in their interest to do so. Without Ryanair, Beauvais goes back to being a barn. So why not waive the fee?

Anyone who’s ever flown Ryanair would be surprised to see those savings passed on to the passenger — but few CEOs have as good a sense of marketing as O’Leary does, and nothing says “free press” quite like “free tickets.”

Meet your guide

Diane Rommel

Diane Rommel has written for The Wall Street Journal, Outside, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Travel + Leisure, Wallpaper and Afar, as well as The Cut, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and McSweeney’s. She once drove from London to Mongolia, via Siberia.