Ryanair lets on eye-watering amount it really makes from bag and seat fees
Ryanair raked in around £24 in extra revenue from each customer who flew last year.
The budget airline has long been known for its punchy approach to extra fees, slapping on charges for hand-luggage that's slightly too big, checking in less than two hours before departure and even for bringing a large water bottle on-board, as the Mirror's Ruby Flanagan recently found out.
One unhappy customer found themselves unable to check-in a bag with Ryanair, despite paying to do so just a minute earlier. He ended up ditching his suitcase in the airport and sprinting to the boarding gate.
Tucked away in Ryanair's end-of-year results is a clear reason why the Irish carrier is so keen to keep the fee revenue rolling in.
Do you have a travel story to share? Email webtravel@reachplc.com
Over the most recent full financial year, Ryanair raked in €4.72billion (£4billion) in 'ancillary revenue'. That means anything extra that passengers pay for, such as excess luggage, seat selection and a cup of coffee. For every one of the 200million passengers who flew with Ryanair last year, they forked out on average £23.80 on top of their ticket.
The figure is a 10% rise on the previous year, when Ryanair scored €4.30billion (£3.67billion) or €23.40 (£20) per passenger.
That number is a big deal for the airline, as it represents around a quarter of its total revenue for the year - €13.95billion (£11.9billion). If that ancillary income is removed from the Ryanair cost sheet, then the airline would be in the red, given its €12.39bn (£10.57billion) operating costs last financial year.
As of 2023, Ryanair ranked among the top five airlines in the world in terms of the revenue it generates from ancillary streams.
These figures make it clear why Ryanair and other budget airlines are so opposed to a vote by the EU's Transport and Tourism Committee that would boost the amount of free hand luggage passengers flying to or from member states can take.
"Passengers should have a right to carry on board one personal item, such as a handbag, backpack or laptop (maximum dimensions of 40x30x15 cm), and one small hand luggage (maximum dimensions of 100 cm and 7 kg) without an additional fee," the committee decided. Before this decision becomes law, it must be voted through by the European Parliament in the coming weeks, and then discussed by country representatives for the European Council.
The proposals have been met with fierce opposition from budget airlines and the Spanish Association of Airlines (ALA), which has criticised it and the Ministry's fines. The organisation argues that such measures limit consumer choice and disrupt fair competition in the EU's single market. 'It's about offering different service models at different price points,' the association stated.
This week Ryanair was handed a massive £91million victory by a Spanish court. The budget airline has been let off paying a €107million (£91million) fine slapped on it last year by the Spanish Ministry of Consumer Affairs. The organisation had claimed that the airlines' policies on charging for hand luggage violated consumer rights.
The fines were part of a wider crackdown that included three other airlines, including Norwegian, totalling €179 million (£152million) in fines. Now the Spanish High Court in Madrid has decided to let Ryanair off, allowing the ruling to sit as a precautionary one.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fashion United
an hour ago
- Fashion United
Percentil acquisition drives MySize Q2 revenue, narrows operating loss
In its second-quarter report, for the quarter ending June 30, 2025, MySize announced revenue of 2 million dollars, a 2 percent increase year-over-year, largely due to the addition of Percentil. This contrasts with a 30 percent year-over-year decrease in revenue for the first half of 2025, which the company attributed to market changes affecting sales from its Orgad segment. Despite the mixed revenue results, MySize saw a significant improvement in its bottom line, with a 49 percent reduction in operating loss for the quarter, reaching a total of 586,000 dollars. MySize also strengthened its presence in Europe's growing circular fashion market with the acquisition of Percentil, a resale platform. The company's strategic move comes as new European Union legislation mandates increased durability, recyclability, and traceability for apparel. According to MySize founder and CEO Ronen Luzon, the acquisition positions the company to help brands comply with these new regulations and find new avenues for growth. "The EU is rewriting fashion's rulebook," Luzon said. "Percentil is designed to help brands comply with these new standards and unlock new opportunities for growth." Percentil, which operates in Spain and other parts of Europe, is central to MySize's strategy. The platform's capabilities in AI-powered product matching, garment grading, and logistics are designed to help brands manage the entire lifecycle of their products, a requirement of the EU's new Circular Economy Action Plan. Luzon sees this regulatory shift as a major opportunity, not a challenge. "Some companies see regulation as a hurdle. We see it as the competitive advantage," he added, noting his belief that fashion resale will become a core part of the industry's infrastructure. MySize plans to invest further in the European resale market, leveraging its three-segment business model (SaaS sizing, e-commerce, and resale) to build operational synergies and recurring revenue streams.
The Guardian
6 hours ago
- The Guardian
Zelenskyy faces daunting trip to the White House – but this time he will not be alone
Volodymyr Zelenskyy will make his second visit to the White House on Monday with the daunting task of reversing the damage done to Ukraine's security prospects by Friday's Trump-Putin summit in Alaska. Zelenskyy will not, however, be alone as he was on his first trip to the White House in February when he was ambushed and humiliated by Donald Trump and the vice-president, JD Vance, who sought to bully him into capitulation to Moscow's demands. This time the Ukrainian leader comes to Washington flanked by a dream team of European leaders, including Britain's Keir Starmer, Germany's Friedrich Merz and France's Emmanuel Macron, who combine economic and military clout with proven rapport with Trump. Their mission will be to use their individual and combined influence to coax the president out of the pro-Russian positions he adopted after just a couple of hours under Putin's sway in the sub-Arctic on Friday. To do that, they will have to project a more convincing sense of resolve and common purpose than they have managed hitherto, argued Ben Rhodes, a former adviser to Barack Obama. 'My advice would be to not capitulate to Trump,' Rhodes said. 'He has grown all too accustomed to people he perceives as weaker bending to his will, which is something that Putin does not do … Zelenskyy cannot be expected to do this alone, as that's what got him into that last mess in the Oval Office. Zelenskyy needs Europe. And the Europeans need to show a strength to stand up to Trump which they have not really shown yet.' Macron and Merz will accompany Zelenskyy on Monday as embodiments of the two pillars of Europe, the French-German axis that is at the core of the EU. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, will be a reminder of Europe's combined importance as an economic juggernaut. Trump struck a EU-US trade deal with her just three weeks ago in Scotland, and hailed the relationship as 'the biggest trading partnership in the world'. Brett Bruen, a former White House director of global engagement, said the European leaders should focus on economics and use the White House meeting 'as a chance to remind Trump how small Russia's economy is vis-a-vis the EU and the UK and other western partners'. Italy's prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, will be a useful bridge: a European far-rightwinger who Trump counts as a friend but who also supports Ukrainian sovereignty. The Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, represents a small European state but he is on Team Zelenskyy because he managed to establish an unexpectedly warm relationship with Trump. The Finn cultivated his access to the president by hastily polishing up his rusty golfing skills for an impromptu trip to Florida in March for a round with Trump, on the recommendation of the Republican senator Lindsey Graham. Stubb used the occasion to offer the perspective of Russia's closest European neighbour, urging Trump not to trust Vladimir Putin. Starmer combines national clout and personal rapport in some measure. Trump has gone out of his way to emphasise their good relations, despite Starmer's 'liberal' outlook, and the president arguably has an incentive not to sour relations ahead of a state visit to the UK next month, an extravaganza in which Trump sets high store. Mark Rutte also brings the influence of high office, as Nato secretary general, with a proven track record of corralling Trump with honeyed words, at one point appointing him the 'daddy' among world leaders, helping avoid any disastrous outbursts at the Nato summit in June. 'A lot of people have learned the lessons of Trump, in terms of how you handle him,' said Kim Darroch, who was the UK ambassador to Washington in Trump's first term. 'There will be a lot of flattery. It's tiresome but it's necessary: it gets you to first base. You tell him how well he's doing, how glad everyone is that he is leading the west to find a solution to the war. But then you get on to the substance.' The fact that all these leaders have cleared their diaries to fly to Washington at short notice is a measure of how alarmed they were by Friday's Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage. The Russian president, wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes after his unprovoked full invasion of Ukraine, was feted with a red carpet and a personal round of applause from Trump, who allowed him to speak first after the truncated abortive meeting and abruptly dropped his previous insistence on a ceasefire. Instead, the US president uncritically accepted Putin's preference to move straight to a comprehensive peace deal, putting the onus on Ukraine to make territorial concessions. One diplomatic observer likened the prospect of Monday's White House showdown to a football team coming out for a second half trailing 0-3 but with a raft of super-substitutes on the field. The first challenge will be staying together and sticking to the same talking points. 'Put up a united front and speak from one set of points,' advised Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to Nato. 'The goal is to get Trump to agree and side with them. But the message must be that their position is real, won't change, and if Trump doesn't agree they will pursue their path on their own.' 'Trump won't have the patience to listen to the same pitch a dozen times,' Darroch said. 'So for the initial round they probably need to select a couple of European speakers alongside Zelenskyy: perhaps Rutte as secretary general of Nato and Macron as the senior European national leader. 'My advice to Starmer would be to wait and see how the conversation goes,' Darroch added. 'If it goes badly off-track, or gets a bit spiky, he can intervene to pull it back on course, or calm it down, or just try to build some bridges. Because the risk is that if Trump thinks that the whole exercise is basically about telling him he's got it wrong, he could react badly or just close the discussion down.' On the way into the White House, Zelenskyy and his European backers can steel themselves with knowledge that not all is lost. The worst fear was that Trump would strike a deal with Putin in Alaska that would be presented as a fait accompli to Kyiv. That did not happen. Furthermore, they have potential allies inside the Trump administration. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, is a traditional Republican whose instincts towards Russia are hawkish, although he has a record of going along with the flow of the president's impulses. On Sunday, Rubio gave the arriving delegation some hope, insisting to NBC that a ceasefire is 'not off the table' and confirming that the US is interested in contributing to western security guarantees to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal, acknowledging 'it's one of their fundamental demands is that if this war were to end, they have to make sure this never happens again'. The arrival of so many European luminaries in Washington is a sign of panic, in part, but also of united resolve. Arguably the only way the delegation could be strengthened would be with the inclusion of a Norwegian. Last week, Trump is reported to have cold-called the Norwegian foreign minister (and former Nato secretary general) Jens Stoltenberg, catching him by surprise on his mobile while he was out on the street. The president is said to have pressed Stoltenberg on his obsession with winning a Nobel peace prize, an award decided by a Norwegian parliamentary-appointed committee. One of the cards Trump's visitors will have in their hands on Monday is a reminder that cosying up to Putin is unlikely to get him the Nobel he craves. 'Second-term Trump has his eye on his place in the history books,' Darroch said. 'This is a point which needs to be put across delicately, but history will be kind to him if he delivers a fair peace in Ukraine; less so if he presses for a capitulation.'
BBC News
7 hours ago
- BBC News
Should Europe wean itself off US tech?
Imagine if US President Donald Trump could flip a switch and turn off Europe's may sound far-fetched, crazy even. But it's a scenario that has been seriously discussed in tech industry and policy circles in recent months, as tensions with Washington have escalated, and concerns about the EU's reliance on American technology have come to the the root of these concerns is the fact just three US giants - Google, Microsoft and Amazon - provide 70% of Europe's cloud-computing infrastructure, the scaffolding on which many online services some question whether an unpredictable US leader would weaponize the situation if relations seriously deteriorated - for example, by ordering those companies to turn off their services in Europe."Critical data would become inaccessible, websites would go dark, and essential state services like hospital IT systems would be thrown into chaos," says Robin Berjon, a digital governance specialist who advises EU believes that concerns over a so called US "kill switch" should be taken seriously. "It's hard to say how much trouble we would be in." Microsoft, Google and Amazon all say they offer "sovereign" cloud computing solutions that safeguard EU clients' data, and would prevent such a scenario ever occurring. The BBC has contacted the US Treasury department for truth, there have always been concerns about the lack of "digital sovereignty" in Europe, where US firms not only dominate the cloud-computing market, but also hardware, satellite internet and now artificial the region's main mobile operating systems - Apple and Android - and payment networks - Mastercard and Visa - are fears became urgent in May when it emerged that Karim Khan, the top prosecutor at the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court (ICC), had lost access to his Microsoft Outlook email account after being sanctioned by the White ICC has issued arrest warrants for top Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over their roles in the Israel-Gaza war - something Mr Trump called "illegitimate".Khan has since temporarily stepped aside until a sexual misconduct probe against him is says that "at no point" did it cease or suspend its services to the ICC, although it was in touch with the ICC "throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection". Since then digital sovereignty has shot up the agenda in Brussels, while some public bodies are already seeking alternatives to US is it realistic to think they could wean themselves off US technology?Digital sovereignty is loosely defined as the ability of a governing body to control the data and technology systems within its problem faced by those pursuing it is the lack of comparable does have its own providers, such as France's OVHCloud, or Germany's Germany's T-Systems or Delos, in cloud they account for a fraction of the market, and don't have the same scale or range of capabilities, says Dario Maisto, a senior analyst covering digital sovereignty at global business consultancy open-source alternatives are available for common software packages like Office and Windows, but while proponents say they are more transparent and accessible, none is as comprehensive or well known. But while moving to sovereign alternatives wouldn't "happen overnight", it's a "myth" to think it's not possible, says Mr notes that the German state of Schleswig-Holstein is currently in the process of phasing out Microsoft products like Office 365 and Windows in favour of open-source solutions such as LibreOffice and Linux. Denmark's Ministry for Digitalisation is piloting a similar scheme."We sometimes overvalue the role of proprietary software in our organisations," Mr Maisto says, pointing out that for key services like word processing and email, open-source solutions work just fine."The main reasons organisations don't use open source are a lack of awareness and misplaced fears about cyber security," he adds."Our prediction is in the next five to 10 years, there will be an accelerated shift [to these solutions] because of this wake-up call." Benjamin Revcolevschi, boss of OVHCloud, tells the BBC that firms like his are ready to answer the sovereignty needs of public and private organisations in Europe."Only European cloud providers, whose headquarters are in the EU and with European governance, are able to offer immunity to non-European laws, to protect sensitive and personal data," he Microsoft, Amazon and Google say they already offer solutions that address concerns about digital sovereignty, solutions which store data on severs in the clients' country or region, not in the tells the BBC that it also partners with trusted local EU suppliers like T-Systems, granting them control over the encryption of client data, and giving customers "a technical veto over their data". The German Army is one of its Microsoft president Brad Smith has promised the firm would take legal action in the "exceedingly unlikely" event the US government ordered it to suspend services, and that it would include a clause in European contracts to that effect."We will continue to look for new ways to ensure the European Commission and our European customers have the options and assurances they need to operate with confidence," a Microsoft spokesman told the BBC. Zach Meyers, from the Brussels-based Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE) think tank, says it might make sense for Europe to develop its own limited sovereign cloud to protect critical government he adds that it's unrealistic to try to "get Americans out of the supply chain, or to ensure that there's Europeans in the supply chain at each point".He points to Gaia X - a scheme launched in 2020 to create a European-based alternative to large, centralised cloud platforms, which has faced significant criticism and delays."A lot of these [tech] markets are winner takes all, so once you're the first mover it's really hard for anyone else to catch up."Instead, Mr Meyers thinks Europe should focus on areas of technology where it might gain an edge."It could be the industrial use of AI, because Europe already has a much bigger, stronger industrial base than the US has," he says. "Or the next generation of chipmaking equipment, because one of the few areas where Europe has foothold is in photolithography - the machines that make the really top-end chips." So where does the digital sovereignty agenda go from here?Some believe nothing will change unless Europe brings in new regulations that force regional organisations and governments to buy local technology. But according to Mr Berjon, the EU has been dragging its feet."There is definitely political interest, but it's a question of turning it into a shared strategy."Matthias Bauer, director at the European Centre for International Political Economy, thinks the goal should be building up Europe's technology sector so it can compete with the US and a report on EU competitiveness in 2024, Mario Draghi, former head of the European Central Bank, noted Europe is "severely lagging behind" in new technologies, and that "only four of the world's top 50 tech companies are European"."It's currently much harder for a tech company based in the EU to scale across the bloc than it would be for the same company in the US," Mr Bauer says."You not only face different languages, but different contract law, labour market laws, tax laws, and also different sector-specific regulation."As for the theory that President Trump might flip a "kill switch" and turn off Europe's internet, he's highly sceptical."It would be a realistic scenario if we were close to a war, but I don't see that on the horizon."Yet Mr Maisto says organisations must take the risk seriously, however remote."Two years ago, we didn't think we would be talking about these topics in these terms in 2025. Now organisations want to get ready for what might happen."
