RYANAIR BULLYING PAYS OFF
Despite this week announcing that they would be withdrawing a huge number of flights from their hub in Alicante, budget airline Ryanair has once again managed to get their own way, albeit only partially by a compromise from the Spanish side.
The announcement was not posted on their own official news feed, where they are all too quick to criticize their competitors, and where they recently revelled in a defeat of the Spanish courts that they are allowed to charge what some consider to be an exceptionally high fee for the printing of boarding passes at the airport for passengers who cannot print their own, overruling the original verdict by a lower court in Spain.
However, in a meeting on Tuesday, chairman of Ryanair, Michael O'Leary, stated that starting this Friday, they would effectively cancel a total of 31 routes and reduce the frequencies on 27 others operating from the Alicante airport of El Altet, in a move to put pressure on the airport authority AENA to allow them to board and disembark on foot, rather than using the safer and more comfortable fitted walkways.
Ryanair claimed that their withdrawal from Alicante would cost the airport around 30 million euro per year and the jobs of 2,000 people would be lost.
On Thursday, following a meeting with AENA, the Conselleria de Infraestructuras, representatives from the town halls of Alicante and Elche, Coepa, la Cámara de Comercioit and representatives of the tourist industry, it has now been suggested that the enforcement of Ryanair to use the walkways could be waived on two out of four of their flights, an increase in the one in four that is allowed at Málaga airport.
The cost to Spain in this latest battle, where the airline wants to change what everybody else in the industry accepts, is not yet known. Given the amount of industry specialists involved and the stress to the workers that these latest threats would have caused has not been considered, and fact that the move to force airlines to use the walkways was originally made on the grounds of safety, time will no doubt tell as to whether the agreement will be accepted or whether Ryanair decide to act again with little regard to any of the real people on the ground who are affected by their non-compromising business tactics.
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