Travelblather

Ryanair: O’Leary the PR guru?

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I love and loathe Micheal O'Leary the CEO of Ryanair in equal measures. I hate flying on his planes... a stressful, grumpy flying experience. Awful.

But I watched his live interview late last week after the much commented upon blogging incident (a member of Ryanair staff being just a little to agressive responding to one blogger's comments about how he'd found a security flaw in the Ryanair website.)

And he came out with the awesome line "We might consider charging customers to use the toilets. After all you have to pay to use them in all sorts of public places these days. I don't see anything wrong with being charged a pound to spend a penny." (I'm paraphrasing here by the way.)

You could see the smile on his face as he said it. He knew he'd just generated acres and acres of coverage for his company for the next week by saying something outrageous. He does it all the time... and we all pick up on it. I blogged a few months back about a previous example. He was suggesting Ryanair might one day offer business class flights with err, 'free services for gentlemen'.

I mean seriously. Does anyone think he'd ever charge passengers to pee? It would NEVER happen!

Part of me wishes the media would ignore rubbish like this... but then again... news seems so dismal these days, maybe crackpot ideas that are clearly just to scandalise people are a bit of light relief?

Here's the latest graphic doing the rounds online... where will it end? One thing is for sure... O'Leary knows how to play the press...