Ryanair warned passengers that Brexit could see them not flying from the UK for a period of time just eight weeks ago – and David O’Brien, Ryanair COO has warned passengers of the knock-on reality of the decision Britons voted for last June.
Speaking at a press conference today, O’Brien said: “The worst outcome is nothing at all. It could well mean no flights. This seems incomprehensible but no-one has yet to tell us by what mechanism flights will occur.
“Particularly when you’ve Lufthansa and Air France [who are] hostile to any reasonable solution on Open Skies.
“It’s entirely in the interests of Frankfurt and Munich that Heathrow gets damaged in 2019. And we seem to be sleepwalking to that outcome.
“In a doomsday scenario we’ll have one aircraft per European base. This is clearly a less than preferable outcome.
“The next two years of our growth will be elsewhere – there will be a shift away from the UK.
One per cent of our capacity is domestic UK. Compare that to 40 per cent of easyJet is domestic to Europe, which could be hugely problematic.”
The CMO of the company Kenny Jacobs added: “The clock has started to tick since Article 50 was triggered. But nothing is going to happen until Merkel gets elected as chancellor. There isn’t an alternative, what we need is urgency [in negotiations].
“It’s going to be ugly and heated – they just need to start getting in a room in Brussels and start thrashing it out. It looks like it’s going to be a harder version of Brexit.”
Jacobs said on Radio 4’s Today programme: “Britain is going to leave open skies as it now stands, we need to see clarity interns of what is going to be the future of open skies, which will mean either a bilateral or not.
“If there isn’t a new bilateral in place, you may have very restrictive or no flying between Europe and the UK for a period.
“And I think It’s clear we’re heading to what looks to be a very ugly divorce at the moment.
“Our call on the government here is to please give us and other airlines clarity. Every airline is saying the same.
“We want to continue doing what we do. Three-quarters of British citizens go to Europe on their holidays, 80 per cent of British business travel is to the continent of Europe, so we need clarity.”
In April, Ryanair issued a warning to customers that the UK could see flights to the EU scrapped “for a period of weeks or months” after March 2019 thanks to Brexit.
Neil Sorahan, CFO, told the press conference: “Brits may want to consider staycations instead of going abroad.” He added that it is “impossible to say” what the final outcome will be because Theresa May and Angela Merkel “aren’t going into detail” about what may happen in sectors at the moment.
He said: “Ryanair is pivoting its growth away from the UK.
“We may see that growth slow down as we get closer to the divorce negotiations coming to an end, unless we get greater certainty as to what we actually can or cannot do within Europe.”
Today’s press conference wasn’t just Brexit-bashing, however. O’Brien also tackled the topic of the British Airways outage this weekend.
A huge power surge caused chaos for thousands of passengers leaving them stranded in various airports across the country; Ryanair’s O’Brien said: “We have three locations where our systems are – if there’s a power surge the others kick in. That’s what most businesses do. We’ve never had a major outage in the time we’ve been online.
“We’ve got a slightly less complex IT footprint than BA.
“[Ryanair] look at the focus that we have in terms of being an online business. Trust us, we’re pretty good at this kind of stuff because we’ve had to be.
“We have full back up, second back up, third back up.
“It was a disaster for them. We had a bit of fun on social media but we do take it very seriously. A lot of people tried to book with us last minute to get to weddings.”
A global IT failure caused the grounding of British Airways (BA) long-haul and short-haul flights, affecting 75,000 passengers.
A BA spokesperson told Express.co.uk: “Our IT systems are now back up and running and we will be operating a full flight schedule at Heathrow and Gatwick on Tuesday May 30.
“We are extremely sorry for the frustration and inconvenience customers experienced over the Bank Holiday weekend and thank them for their patience and understanding.
“We are continuing to work to get delayed bags to customers as quickly as possible and information on how to track a bag can be found on ba.com.”
