Former Go boss offers lessons in flying high

You want to start your own no-frills airline? Want to dress up in army fatigues and roll into your local airport in a tank, à la Ryanair's Michael O'Leary?

Want to dress up in an orange boiler suit and stroll around Stansted airport handing out leaflets, à la EasyJet's Stelios Haji-Ioannou?

Well Barbara Cassani, former boss of Go airlines, is here to help. Her new book provides plenty of advice on operating and managing a budget airline. But it also includes a list entitled "what not to do" if you want to build a successful low-cost airline.

In truncated form it reads: Hire as chief executive a frustrated pilot or engineer - they'll be really interested in visiting the Boeing and Airbus factories.

Develop an antagonistic relationship with unions and allow poor morale to eat away at your organisation. Make route decisions based on where you'd like to fly to play golf or go to the theatre.

Build an expensive central cost base. Use expensive prime time TV adverts to justify to customers why they should pay so much. Use expensive travel agents who don't add extra value but cost a packet. Make it really difficult for leisure travellers to get low fares, confuse them with fares structures and conditions in small print at the bottom of every ticket.

Ms Cassani, who now heads London's bid for the 2012 Olympics, tried to break every one of these rules during her time at Go. Some say she failed, others say she triumphed with arch enemy EasyJet eventually forced to buy out Go for £374 million (€538.8 million).

To this day, Ms Cassani believes this price was a giveaway and that major Go shareholders, venture capitalists 3i, let £600 million of potential slip away when they agreed to the sale.

The American has again become the darling of the British media in her new Olympics role. At the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, she was impeccably turned out. With an infectious laugh and a streak of self deprecation not found in too many chief executives, Ms Cassani is not your typical pin-striped member of the British business establishment.

London's boardrooms have sometimes been accused of breeding a dull form of conformity. Maybe that is why Ms Cassani's three main features (she is young, informal and American) were regarded as almost mysterious by some members of the financial press. Not that the popular press was much better, with one tabloid hoisting the headline, "Mother of two starts airline".

While she admits that being a young business woman helped her get more publicity for Go, it was not a big deal, although she was worried about what the next headline might be: Mother who launders starts airline?

Taking on Ryanair and EasyJet helped concentrate the mind quickly. It was sometimes tough and bruising but she is sanguine about the experience of battling the likes of Mr O'Leary and Mr Haji-Ioannou.

"We certainly created the best airline out of the three. But because we were weaker, younger, we lost. End of story. So there is a raw quality to business, that is just part of playing the game," she says.

When EasyJet swallowed up Go it was the end of the story. Virtually nothing of Go is left and many staff departed after the EasyJet acquisition, she says.

While this was a hard outcome for a brave experiment, Ms Cassani admits the ability of EasyJet and particularly Ryanair to play tough at certain key junctures was almost as traumatic a discovery.

When Ms Cassani decided in 2001 to start what she calls "World War Three" by operating flights between Dublin and Edinburgh and Dublin and Glasgow, Ryanair's response was dramatic and brutish from a Go perspective.

Ms Cassani claims Mr O'Leary took Go's decision to go into Edinburgh as a personal affront and that Ryanair wasted millions of pounds starting the Edinburgh route and dropping prices to £10 one-way to Glasgow. She believes thwarting Go was the motivation. After Ryanair slashed its prices further on the Edinburgh route, Go was forced to cry off and, more important, retreat.

Her books recalls the episode. "We got a thrashing on the new route as Ryanair slashed prices even further. Going head-to-head cost us millions and we withdrew wounded. We learned another crucial lesson about discounting. You can't take on someone with lower costs because they dig deeper than you to lower their prices and still make money, while you're bleeding."

Her view of Mr O'Leary is no doubt partly coloured by the fierce competition between the airlines during this fractious period. She has never met him personally, but has no animosity towards the Ryanair chief.

"Nothing is ever personal with me. It was all about filling seats or promoting the airline, or making sure people understood who we were and for him it's the same thing. It's about Ryanair. It's about whatever cause he's jumped on at the moment."

As for the Edinburgh experience. "We seriously misjudged how seriously and how angry they would take the incursion into Dublin. It was just a really tough lesson in business," she says. She also compliments Mr O'Leary's track record in Ryanair. "He saved the airline, OK a number of them did, but he should be credited with that. Ryanair was on the rocks. It was one of those inbetweeney airlines."

But the praise is balanced by more negative comment about Ryanair. "I would just never work for them. I wouldn't want to be treated the way he treats people and I wouldn't want to treat customers the way he encourages his staff to treat customers.

"Our check-in desks at Stansted were right across from Ryanair's and my assessment of Ryanair is that when everything is going well it's fine, but when things go wrong they would literally shut the desks down."

While not a big admirer of Ryanair's customer service, Ms Cassani is more humorous about O'Leary the man

"I think the accountancy association of the world should vote him as their poster boy. This is what you can do even if you start as a bean counter. You can have a mouth like a publican or a drunken sailor."

Whether accountants around the world want to replicate Mr O'Leary's career is uncertain, but Ms Cassani admits Ryanair won the Edinburgh tussle and Go had to leave the route.

Her differences with Mr O'Leary appear to come down to the definition of low-cost travel. "I disagree with Michael's philosphy, which is you pay low prices, you get crummy service and I actually think he has done a disservice to the rest of us."

After the sale to EasyJet she took up her role fronting the London 2012 Olympics bid. Taking on Ryanair and EasyJet might have been difficult, but the challenge of mounting an Olympic bid is daunting, she says.

Nevertheless the bid which involves building a massive Olympics stadium in the most unlikely of settings - London's east end - is not fazing her. She says the bid could fail, but so what? It is worth trying.

Go: An Airline Adventure is published by Time Warner books.