Ok, look, FR has good days and bad days. Sometime they do "a good job" and sometimes they don't. Their defined service standard is very low and they boast about this, as it is the fundament of their low costs. So set your expectations accordingly and you shouldn't have a bad day, unless you end up stranded and alone in some third rate airfield. Then you can mouthe off about them being $h1t€ at what they do. If you want them to offer SQ style F service - then they're $h1t€ all the time.

How you define whether they "do a good job" is a matter of expectation, and FR knows a thing or two about managing expectations. Ryanair makes one simple claim - we'll get you there, on-time and cheaper than the competitors. We'll skip the invective - as we can all point to (frequent?) instances where this is not true - the "my colleague flew with FR and blah, blah, blah" stories. It only take one plane to go tech for 200 people by 5 return flights in a day to produce 2000 people with a "Ryanair are $h1t€" story.

I won't defend FR - I loathe them - they have consistently displayed a wanton disregard for people - staff and passengers - in a manner that leaves people in a very bad situation. However, FR is there to make massive profits and this is their stated position - so they will consistently put profits before people - and they are proud to let you know this i advance of travelling. Most corporations won't do this. FR just won't pretend to be nice, or try to appease you, like most corporations try to do. FR's position could be summarised like this:

Our plane from (insert secondary airfield name here) to (insert tertiary airfield name here) is leaving at this time. Buy early, turn up early and we'll probably get you there on time and cheaper than our competitors. If anything goes wrong, we'll screw you. And if you want to whinge about that you can screw yourself. Have a nice day, or not, depending on the circumstances - either way we don't much care, because it's too expensive to pay someone to listen to your complaints, so, we'll just replace your custom with another cheap fare loving @$$ in our seats - and we'll all be happier like that. So, do you want to ride with Ryanair? Do ya? If you do, then shut up and let us get on with it - we'll probably get you there on-time and cheaper than the competitors. If we don't, we'll just assume you won't be happy, but it will simply cost us too much to care, so kindly go screw yourself, quietly and somewhere else. Low fares, low service, high numbers, high profits - set your expectations accordingly. Take us or leave us, but for f***s sake don't waste our time - oh, and it'll be a waste of yours too if you complain, or are not happy, so don't waste anyone's time with invective. Did we mention the low fares at ryanair.com?

Ryanair's honesty and lack of hypocrasy is at least refreshing - and their profits are impressive; their offered service doesn't suit me, nor my status loving pride, so, personally, I avoid them. For me it's that simple. Live and let fly, would be my take on all this.

The one thing, however, that I won't forgive them for is their anti-competative dominance - they'll enter a route, slaughter the competition with untenably low prices, and then, increase the average price paid per seat back to original levels, or sometimes higher levels. This is the famous Walmart effect that people in the US will be familiar with - the store moves in, cuts prices, waits for the local (smaller?) competition to wither away and then they raise prices again leaving the customer without any choice - no competition and no voice to complain.