Ryanair loses altitude

Europe’s biggest budget airline will profit from rivals’ problems this winter. But it has also been making its own life difficult. Marina Gerner reports.

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Staff revolt: Ryanair has had a turbulent year
(Image credit: 2018 Getty Images)

"We expect more failures this winter," warned Michael O'Leary this week. Ryanair's CEO predicted that some of the Irish airline's smaller airline rivals will go bust. He pointed to a number of recent collapses, including Danish airline Primera Air and Britain's Monarch. That certainly seems "a reasonable bet", says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Most of the "usual ingredients" for a crisis among small European airlines are in place.

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Marina Gerner is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has written for the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, The Guardian and Standpoint magazine in the UK; the New York Observer in the US; and die Bild and Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany.

Marina is also an adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business at their London campus, and has a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Her first book, The Vagina Business, deals with the potential of “femtech” to transform women’s lives, and will be published by Icon Books in September 2024.

Marina is trilingual and lives in London.