Proving once again he’s a narrow-minded arrogant little business depot, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary is promoting a price war to get people traveling, no matter what. While some decision-makers ponder the deeper implications of COVID-19, Ryanair’s boss is all about profit the old way, with no inking of sustainable futures.
I almost feel bad criticizing O’Leary here, but his version of budget travel is all done, no matter what he says. The Ryanair CEO was quoted by Travel Mole and other media speaking at WTM Virtual:
“They’ll go back because airlines, led by Ryanair, will discount prices, the hotels will discount prices into the summer of 2021, the winter 2021 into the summer of 2022; we will all discount to try to recover the business we have lost.”
O’Leary is preaching a “snap back” in travel demand, which may in fact occur. But the problem with the famous airline entrepreneur’s ideas is the total lack of recognition of the possibilities the pandemic presents. Or, the “lesson” we should be learning here, it simply evades the money-grubbing bean counters of Earth. Ryanair, TUI, Walmart, the cost chopping entities that have made everything cheap and accessible, but they have also created gigantic problems we can no longer overlook. The authors of the book “Understanding and Governing Sustainable Tourism Mobility: Psychological and Behavioural Approaches” put things into perspective:
“Sustainable transportation is now established as the critical issue confronting a global tourism industry that is palpably unsustainable, and aviation lies at the heart of this issue.”
The bottom line here is, people like O’Leary would milk a cow dry as overcooked popcorn just to squeeze another drop of profit. Their high volume, low margin world is crumbling around them, and their narcissist self-belief systems just won’t let them truly innovated. They’re just not that smart. This is what I tell my colleagues. And I am not just talking about big-chief billionaires like O’Leary.
Hell, O’Leary was even bragging about how Ryanair kept flying even during the worst pandemic since the bubonic plague. If he really was a hero of business thinking, he’d have thought about cancelling all flights until further notice. I get this image of his planes full of skeletons, like something out of a Resident Evil or Living Dead movie. Cost, cost, cost, cost. The Irish businessman sounds like a parrot with a skull injury that makes it repeat broken record style the same old corporate bullshit that got the climate catastrophe going in the first place.
This guy thinks people are going to cram themselves into his aluminum sardine cans like before. But O’Leary is not alone in his reverberating blindness. All the travel executives who rely on the big bucks from these billionaires practice the same mimicking droll. “Tourist numbers will rebound”, in the same breath as “We are committed to a sustainable future.”
O’Leary, your transparent greed and arrogance make me think the only way to a sustainable world is to rocket you and every other lucky tax accountant on Earth to Mars. If you guys were off the planet, perhaps real thinking and innovation might take place.
How about doing something really innovative and fantastic for a change?