Ryanair To Go 100% Web Check-In From October and closes all traditional airport check in desks

Ryanair, Europe’s announced it will move to 100% web check-in from 1st October 2009. This move will allow all passengers, including those travelling with checked baggage, to check-in online thereby avoiding time wasting queues and delays at airport check-in desks.

Ryanair’s web check-in service is open from 15 days to 4 hours before the scheduled departure time of each flight. Web check-in can be accessed via ryanair.com using booking confirmation numbers or flight details to retrieve each reservation.

Having printed their boarding cards at home passengers without check-in bags can continue to proceed directly through airport security while those with check-in bags can simply present at one of Ryanair’s “drop desks” before proceeding through airport security to the boarding gate. This will free passengers from wasting hours at airports prior to departure and will dramatically reduce travel times for all Ryanair passengers.

Ryanair will phase in the introduction of its 100% web check-in as follows:

· Phase 1: From 19th March 2009, Ryanair’s web check-in service will be extended to (a) non EU/EEA citizens, (b) passengers travelling with checked baggage and (c) reduced mobility customers.

Customers choosing web check-in and travelling with only carry-on bags will continue to enjoy this service free of charge. A web check-in fee of £5/€5 per person/per flight will apply to passengers travelling with checked baggage, while customers who wish to use airport check-in will be charged an airport check-in fee of £10/€10 per person/per flight at the time of booking.

· Phase 2: From 1st May 2009 all new bookings will be required to use web check-in, and the use of traditional airport check-in desks will be phased out over the summer months. The web check-in fee of £5/€5 per person, per flight will apply to all new bookings (except promotional fares) from 1st May 2009. In order to dissuade passengers from using airport check-in desks, the fee for airport check-in will double to £20/€20 per person/per flight at the time of booking.

· Phase 3: From 1st October 2009 airport check-in desks will no longer be available at any Ryanair airport. All passengers will be required to web check-in and those who have checked in bags will use the airport “bag drop” desks, if required. From this date, children under the age of 16 will no longer be able to travel unaccompanied and passports and national ID cards will be the only accepted forms of photo ID on Ryanair flights.

Ryanair insults bloggers about o Euro booking screenshots. Is it a Marketing strategy?

Jason Roe wrote in his blog about what he thinks is a bug in RyanAir’s website. Some RyanAir employees saw it and left some pretty rude comments.

Ryanair's (Social) Marketing Strategy is some sort of “Any publicity is good publicity” and Guerillia Marketing actions.

This Blog post fom Jason Roe caught attention in the UK, Germany, Italy and many other countries and guaranteed free coverage for Ryanair! However, there are not going to be any customers that ever booked a Ryanair flight because they offer customer-oriented and friendly service and user-friendly and well designed website. Then again - isn't strange that blog author Jason Roe announces his presence at the Irish Blog Awards? Did this news posting help the Blogger to gain attention as well?

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Ryanair to Eliminate Check-in Counters

Ryanair hopes to eliminate all check-in counters by the end of the year and replace them with a self-service bag drop. Customers would check-in on line and then bring their bags to a designated area of the airport. The move is part Ryanair's overall goal to cut services and thereby reduce costs. Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary told the Telegraph of London, "Ultimately, we want just one in five people to check in luggage."
The European low-cost carrier also recently announced it will begin charging a £28.50 for duty-free shopping if those purchases cannot fit into a passenger's carry-on luggage.
Ryanair's business model is simple, and no secret: Passengers who need the bare minimum (basically a seat aboard the plane) can travel cheaply, but people who need anything beyond that minimum service will be hit with expensive fees left and right. In my mind, however, these moves push the carrier a bit beyond reasonable "no-frills" service and toward something more like cheap bus travel. I'm sure Ryanair has a plan for its "bag drops," but the idea seems fraught with potential issues. How easy would it be for a passenger to make a mistake somewhere along the check-in process? How secure is the bag drop? And charging passengers to bring duty-free purchases aboard seems downright cynical to me, though it will keep the overhead bins less crowded, which is largely Ryanair's goal.

Smartertravel

New York Post: Getting a Goat’s View of Sardinia’s East Coast

On the ruggedly gorgeous coast of the Orosei Gulf, in eastern Sardinia, purple limestone cliffs erupt from the Mediterranean like thousand-foot-high walls of some unconquerable redoubt. Ravines wild with goats tumble onto isolated beaches. On hot days when the sirocco wind blows, the land can smell of wild rosemary and thyme.


Orosel Gulf For all its physical flamboyance, the Orosei (pronounced oh-roh-ZEYE) offers a quieter holiday than the Costa Smeralda, its tony neighbor about two hours north. There, Italian playboys and Arab oligarchs moor their megayachts in twinkling harbors while the paparazzi have a field day.

“The Costa Smeralda is not for us,” said Cosci Vasco, a butcher from Val d’Aosta who was vacationing last summer on Sardinia’s eastern shore with his wife, Paola, a librarian. “The Orosei is very pretty.”

Breathtaking is more like it. About half a dozen remote beaches sit tucked into the limestone folds along the roughly 35 miles of gulf coast, and the customary way to reach many of them is by boat.

Read More

Launch of Europe’s 1st Fleet Wide Inflight Mobile Phone Service

PASSENGERS CAN NOW CALL & TEXT ONBOARD 20 RYANAIR AIRCRAFT

Ryanair, Europe’s largest low fares airline, today (19th Feb) launched its in-flight mobile phone service initially onboard 20 of its (mainly) Dublin based aircraft. This is the first step in fitting Ryanair’s entire fleet of over 170 aircraft to allow all passengers to make and receive mobile calls and texts on all Ryanair flights.

Passengers on Ryanair’s 20 OnAir enabled aircraft can now make and receive voice calls at (non- EU) international roaming rates (€2-€3 pm) text messages (50c+) and email (€1-€2) using their mobile phones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones. These price tariffs are set by each mobile service provider and are subject to each customer’s individual price plan.

The service will initially be available to “02” and “Vodafone” customers and to customers of over 50 other mobile phone operators across Europe. At the launch OnAir confirmed that it is working with other Irish mobile operators (“3” and “Meteor”) to ensure that their customers can also keep in touch with the office, family and friends when travelling.


Michael O’Leary said:

“Today’s launch by Ryanair and OnAir is the first step to offering in-flight mobile phone services onboard our entire fleet of over 170 aircraft over the next 18 months. This service will allow passengers to keep in touch with the office, family or friends. We expect customer demand for this service to grow rapidly and hope that customers of all Irish mobile operators will soon be able to call or text home from 30,000 feet to tell loved ones of yet another on time Ryanair flight.”

Benoit Debains, CEO of OnAir, said

“Mobile OnAir is the most advanced in-flight communications service in the world and this European fleet-wide rollout marks a real milestone in aviation. We are proud to work with Ryanair, the world’s largest international scheduled airline, and to provide their 67 million passengers with access to this new technology which will enable them to send and receive emails, text messages, download attachments and make and receive calls just as they would on the ground.’

Ryanair.com

IATA: More Accidents But Fewer Fatalities in 2008

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced the
aviation safety performance for 2008. The total number of fatalities from aviation accidents
dropped from 692 in 2007 to 502 in 2008. This resulted in a 56% improvement in the fatality ratefrom 0.23 fatalities per million passengers to 0.13 per million passengers.
The global accident rate (measured in hull losses per million flights of Western-built jet aircraft)
stood at 0.81—or one accident for every 1.2 million flights. This is a slight deterioration on 2007
performance when the accident rate was 0.75—or one accident for every 1.3 million flights.
There were 109 accidents in 2008 compared to 100 in 2007. The number of fatal accidents
increased from 20 in 2007 to 23 in 2008.
IATA member airlines significantly outperformed the industry in safety. With 33 accidents, IATA members drove their accident rate downwards from 0.68 in 2007 to 0.52 in 2008. That is equal to one accident for every 1.9 million flights.
“Safety is the industry’s number one priority. Today’s statistics confirm that travelling by air is one the safest things that a person can do,” said Giovanni Bisignani, Director General and CEO of
IATA.
The IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) is the global industry standard for airline safety
management. As of 1 January 2009, IOSA is a condition of IATA membership. Currently, 204
member airlines are among the 282 carriers on the IOSA registry (www.iata.org/registry). A further21 IATA member airlines are undergoing quality control checks. Airlines that have not passed the quality control process by 31 March 2009 will have their memberships terminated.
“IATA is a quality association. And the mark of that quality is safety. While we will be strict in
upholding the IOSA standards, which are recognised by governments around the world, our goal is to raise the bar on safety with a transparent global standard and bring all of our members on
board,” said Bisignani.
There are significant regional differences in the accident rate.
North Asia had a perfect record of zero hull losses in 2008. North America (0.58), Europe (0.42)
and Asia / Pacific (0.58) all performed better than the global average.
Africa had an accident rate that was 2.6 times worse than the world average (2.12). However, this extends a year-on-year trend of significant improvements. In 2005, for example, the Africa rate was the worst in the world at 9.21. There was one Western-built jet hull loss with an African carrier in 2008.
The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) had the worst accident rate in the world at
6.43 (7.9 times worse than the global average). The relatively small fleet of Western-built jet
aircraft operated in the region means that even a few accidents can skew the numbers
considerably. In 2005 and 2007 there were no accidents in the region. In 2006 two accidents drove the hull loss rate to 8.6. Last year there were three Western-built hull losses with CIS carriers.
Latin America and the Caribbean had a hull loss rate of 2.55 (3.1 times worse than the global
average). The region’s carriers had five hull losses during 2008. Addressing infrastructure issues
remains a top priority. Middle East and North Africa saw its accident rate worsen to 1.89 in 2008 with two accidents involving carriers from the region.

Three issues emerged in 2008:
· Runway excursions accounted for 25% of all accidents in 2008. IATA will launch a Runway Safety Toolkit in 2009, which it has developed with Flight Safety Foundation. The toolkit will also be incorporated with IATA’s broad ranging safety data tools in the IATA Global Safety Information Centre to be launched later this year.
· Ground damage accounted for 17% of all accidents in 2008. To improve safety and combat this US$4 billion annual industry cost, IATA has launched the IATA Safety Audit for Ground Operations (ISAGO). This is the first global safety standard for ground operations. A total of 80 audits are targeted for this year.
· A total of 30% of all accidents in 2008 noted deficient safety management at the airline level as a contributing factor. IATA has incorporated a requirement for Safety Management Systems (SMS) into the IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) and is working with carriers at an individual and regional level for effective implementation.
These initiatives are consistent with IATA’s comprehensive Six-point Safety Programme which focuses on (1) infrastructure safety, (2) safety data management and analysis, (3) operations, (4)
Safety Management Systems, (5) maintenance and (6) auditing.
“Our record on safety is impressive. But the accident in Buffalo last week and all the 502 fatalities in air accidents in 2008 are human tragedies reminding airlines, regulators and industry partners everywhere that safety is a constant challenge and we must always strive to do better. Our target is zero accidents, and zero fatalities. Nothing less is an acceptable result,” said Bisignani.