Ryanair wakes up to true scale of reputational damage

There will be MBA case studies done in the future on just how Ryanair should have handled a staff rostering crisis that will see it cancel more than 2,000 flights in the six weeks to the end of October.

Dismissing it as an effort to improve punctuality – the airline’s starting position – will, needless to say, not feature among the suggested approaches. The fall-back argument that “only” 2 per cent of flights would be affected by the cancellation of up to 50 flights a day was equally crass – and wrong.

For as long as Ryanair was unable, or unwilling, to detail which flights would be affected, every passenger on every flight was necessarily uncertain about their prospects of getting to their destination and equally irritated by that uncertainty.

For the same reason, no one in their right mind would have booked a flight with the airline for the period concerned. In terms of how to make a bad situation exponentially worse, Ryanair ticked just about every box.

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Stock market verdict

Only after the stock market had given its verdict on Monday morning did a management famed for its ability to react quickly to events appear to wake up to the scale of the reputational disaster confronting it.

When he spoke finally, in a conference call with analysts, Michael O’Leary showed his ability to cut to the core of an issue – accepting the airline had screwed up, albeit with some self-serving qualification, and promising full details of flights affected by close of business.

Of course, O’Leary would have been to the fore in calling for heads on a plate had an airport, traffic controllers, a regulator, or government department been responsible for his airline having to shelve anything like this number of flights.

No doubt Ryanair will swagger back into the market with a massive seat sale and other incentives in an effort to leave behind this sorry episode. But the scale of the miscalculation may yet unnerve customers and possibly investors in the long term. Has Ryanair lost its touch?