You may have already seen the blog outcry regarding comments made by a Ryanair employee after Jason Roe claimed to have found a bug in the Ryanair site.

The comments on his blog included the gem: “what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway” – which got picked up by a certain Matt Mullenweg, and a lot of other WordPress users (Guess which CMS I use and recommend!)

Then the official response from Ryanair poured petrol on the fire:

(From Travolution) Stephen McNamara from Ryanair said:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.

“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel”

Now both Ryanair and boss Michael O’Leary are not afraid of controvery or picking a fight.

But…

Google blog search for Ryanair Feb 24, 2009. Top blog is Matt Mullenwegs

Then comes….

Google News search for Ryanair Feb 24

Resulting in:

Normal Google Search: Feb 25 - Idiot Bloggers in at #4

What is interesting is that Ryanair currently has a fairly strong position in terms of competitors (It’s them and Easyjet, really), and it’s unlikely to see any strong rivals enter the market in the current economic climate.

And certainly previous controversies, or plans just announced to increase charges for luggage etc, haven’t hurt them too much in the old media world.  They had cheap prices and some name awareness.

But there’s no guarantee someone couldn’t arrive with a difference approach if the market is viable – for instance Jetblue or Southwest?

And funniest of all:

Imagine any other company actively courting negative publicity and high ranking negative search returns on the same day as it’s revealed Ryanair plan to keep customer costs down by selling advertising on their booking website.

And Brand Republic also says: ‘Nearly all of Ryanair’s flights are booked online, which the airline plans to use to bring in advertising from non-travel and FMCG brands.’

In summary:

They’ve gone out of their way to guarantee prominent negative results on a major source of almost all of their revenue, on which they are building plans to advertise irrelevant companies which will surround a site on which people want to complete a purchase quickly and efficiently, and on which a confusing bug/anomaly has been discovered.

Bonus extras:

Compare that to Richard Branson phoning someone who complained about Virgin airline food.

Suddenly that cheap flight might not seem worth the saving, particularly when a sandwich, crisps and a drink can cost £10, a mobile phone call is £3 per minute, and it costs you £10 each way to check your luggage, which is likely to rise shortly.

Would anyone now believe;

““Overpriced retailers like Stansted have conspired with the airlines to get passengers to show up three hours early to spend money in their overpriced shops,” Mr O’Leary said. (The Times).

Or:

‘Ryanair critic called ‘idiot blogger’ by staff member. After flying with them last month, I feel like one too’ (The Telegraph)