Zero-hour contracts and no food or water: inside the savage machine of low-cost flights

Photo by Tomáš Nožina on Unsplash

By Anna Freeman

The true cost of low cost air travel is much higher than your €19 ticket

Ryanair: the black sheep of the aviation family. It’s the bad seed that habitually disappoints you and causes you more pain than enjoyment, but whom you have to tolerate regardless. The Irish company is now infamous for offering impossibly low fares - sometimes so low that you have to check it is not a website misprint - in exchange for a minimum guarantee of service. That minimum is getting you to your destination safely, and that’s about it.

This summer, the rabid consumerism with which we buy and travel on low-cost airlines came to a head. Ryanair experienced the biggest pilot strikes in its history. Up to 67,000 passengers were affected by the cancellation of almost 400 flights. 15 days before, 600 flights were affected due to the strike of cabin crew. Yet, despite Ryanair’s reputation for being a penny-pinching, investment-straddling empire, it has cultivated a consumer base like no other in Europe. Ryanair is now the continent’s biggest low-cost airline, and announced that it achieved a 9 percent increase in passengers in the year ended March 31 to 130 million, leading to an astronomical net profit of €1.45 billion.

Such success was achieved in spite of a pilot-rostering crisis last year that grounded 25 of its 400 aircrafts and the cancellation of thousands of flights, and a growing disgruntlement among its ranks. It remains to be seen how this summer’s strikes will affect future sales. But what sets Ryanair apart from its competitors - namely easyJet, Air Berlin and Vueling - is a unique model of capitalist aggression on top of a loophole ridden complex structure of employment agreements intended to cut costs at every turn. As one cabin crew member put it: “There are low-cost airlines... and then there is Ryanair.”