Opinion: Remind me to fly Ryanair
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Perhaps it’s time to finally ditch the oft-made comparison between Southwest Airlines and Ryanair, the uber-low-cost European carrier that makes the former look positively first class. Sure, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary drew his initial inspiration from Southwest, but take a look at this article and the accompanying photo:
Ryanair has locked horns with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) over a newspaper advert featuring a ‘saucy schoolgirl’, the BBC reports. The advert punting cheap flights, which appeared in the Herald, Daily Mail and Scottish Daily Mail, shows a teen temptress (right) with the strapline “Hottest back to school fares”. . . According to the ASA adjudication, Ryanair ‘disagreed that the ad suggested sexual connotations’ and further ‘believed it was obvious that the image was of a woman fully clothed and that the short skirt and bare midriff were representative of the type of clothing that was fashionable among young women in the UK’. Ryanair defended that it ‘believed the ad was likely to be found offensive only by the minority of people who were likely to find any such representation objectionable’.
Yep, Southwest sets a different mood by dressing its flight attendants in more casual, shorts and T-shirt uniforms, while Ryanair entices passengers to its planes with pictures of....jail bait — how far we Americans have yet to go. And this is the lesser of Ryanair’s current adventures in advertising faux-pas.
Anyone remember Hooters Air?