Ryanair cuts baggage and boarding pass fees in bid to improve customer service

Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary has made a U-turn on customer service after previous
 outspoken attacks on passengers. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA

Ryanair has followed up its pledge to "not unnecessarily piss people off" by cutting some of its most excessive charges, including baggage fees and penalties for not printing a boarding pass.
The first concrete measures announced since chief executive Michael O'Leary made a Damascene conversion to better customer service will also include more tolerance of minor booking errors, fewer irritating announcements onboard and allowing passengers a second small piece of hand luggage with them on the plane.

Ryanair said that, after extensive customer feedback on its website, it would introduce several improvements over the next six months.

Customers will soon be able to search for flights online without having to enter security codes, and will have 24 hours' grace to correct minor errors, such as spellings of names and routings, in bookings.

On early morning and late evening flights, the airline will make only safety announcements, rather than the current barrage of sales pitches and marketing, and dim the cabin lights.

From December, boarding card reissue fees will be cut from €70 or £70 to €15 or £15, although only for customers who have already checked in online. Those who forget will still pay the standard fine. In January, airport bag fees for luggage put in the hold will be halved to €30 or £30 at the bag drop desk.

O'Leary, who this week overcame his previous disdain for social media to engage directly with customers on Twitter, said: "As we implement our plans to grow from 80 million to over 110 million customers per annum over the next five years, we are actively listening and responding to our customers."

He put that philosophy into practice to mixed effect on Friday afternoon in his second foray on to Twitter, where despite his recent pledge to tone down the Irish airline's "macho" image, he informed customers that he kept fit via "Tantric sex. Works for Sting … n' me!", repeatedly plugged the airline's calendar featuring undressed female cabin crew and eventually signed off saying it was time for "3pm cocktails, dancing girls".

Ryanair's customer service director, Caroline Green, said: "As some of these policy changes will require website changes and staff retraining, we will be rolling them out over the next few months as we strive to further improve Europe's No 1 customer service airline."

She added that if customers should make had other suggestions and feedback on the changes by going, they should make them online. This represented a significant change from previous attitudes to online customer feedback, when a customer who created a Facebook page to protest at spending hundreds of euros for her family's boarding passes to be reissued was derided as "so stupid" by O'Leary for her "fuck-up". 

However, O'Leary's belief that all publicity was good publicity appeared to be shaken by shareholders at the airline's annual meeting in September who told him that the negative image needed to be addressed – underlined by news that day that Ryanair had forced a doctor to pay in full to change to an earlier flight home after his family were killed in a fire.

Since then, O'Leary has employed the word "sorry" surprisingly frequently. He told the Guardian this week that there was "a mistaken belief that I'm a tough guy. I'm like a little caramel crisp".

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