Ryanair starts advertising its competitors
For reasons I shan’t go into here just yet, I’m hoping to have reason to make more frequent trips back to Belfast in the coming months. The eco friendly option is the attractively priced train and ferry, but it’s slow and no use for a day trip. The budget choice has to be Ryanair, who fly from Prestwick Airport to Belfast City Airport.
Here’s the booking screen for a flight in March that I researched this afternoon:
Yep, the fare is just £0.01.
How do they subsidise such cheap air fares? Well, perhaps by allowing Google Ads to sell advertising space to Ryanair’s direct competitors on the same page:
I think there are other charges eg. 4.50 payment fee, 4.50 check in fee (free if check in online) >4 hours before flight) £15 (ish) per case. Will still be cheap but more than 1p
In the case illustrated above, looks like Ryanair are swallowing the taxes and paying that out of the other (dearer and later) passengers fares. Sometimes, they do that. Sometimes they don’t.
With regard to the Google Ads. Ryanair will be overjoyed that Easyjet have appeared in the Google box. Because their average fare is lower than Easyjet’s, and so they’ll be pretty certain that it’ll do them good and not harm.