You can now pay for a Ryanair flight with an American Express credit card. But is this move enough for it to attract business passengers?
Ryanair has started allowing customers to pay for its flights with American Express cards in an attempt to attract more business customers.
Around 20% of passengers currently use the budget airline for business travel. Changes, such as a specialised bundle ticket including a free drink, allocated seats and a fast-track service, may be introduced to push this percentage up.
The airline is also revamping the website in November to make it quicker and easier for passengers to book flights.
Business customers
In an age of austerity many companies are looking to save money and the airline believes allowing more business customers to book through the site will boost its profits. It will cost passengers an administration fee of €7 plus 2% of the fare to pay with an American Express, which is the charge levied on all credit cards used through the website.
The new payment system was soft launched last Thursday. Around 2% of bookings are now being made with American Express cards.
Deputy Chief Executive Officer Howard Millar said the company is also looking at offering specialised bundle tickets for business customers, but he couldn’t confirm when this might happen.
A registration service, similar to Amazon, which will remember customer details and a mobile boarding pass are also on the cards.
Website changes
The airline is making a host of other changes including a new website which will be launched at the end of November.
The mobile app, which is currently €3, will become free and an online chat facility will be introduced. Tools such as the Recaptcha security feature, where customers have to enter in a code before being allowed through to a payment page, will be scrapped from the end of October.
Millar said “people have to say ‘no thanks’ too often” on the site currently and promised to "take the clutter out" by reducing the number of clicks it takes to make a booking. Marketing emails have been too much of a “blunt instrument”, and will in future be more focused to suit individual customer needs.
Customer service record
Ryanair is frequently picked up for having a poor customer service track record and recently topped a list of the worst UK brands by consumer group Which?
When I asked Millar about this he accepted there were customer service “irritants” and said the company was planning on addressing these during the next year. He also said it will become more flexible when it comes to passenger cancellations and compensation.
“We can’t promise anything over night. We realise we need to address some faults with customer service and this will take a lot of thought and a sensitive approach,” he said.
Competition in the business sector
Most other airlines already offer business flights; they’ve been available from rival budget airline easyJet for the past two years.
For example, a flight from Gatwick to Berlin, at 6.30am next Wednesday would cost £43.99 on a standard flight or £134.99 on a business flight with easyJet. Compare this to British Airways, at £220 or £493 respectively, and you can see the clear cost difference.
With easyJet the more expensive ticket includes a range of extras such as unlimited free date changes, an item of hand luggage and a 20kg hold luggage item, no extra booking fees, speedy boarding and fast-track security.
American Express payments
If you already have an American Express card, and are looking to buy flights with Ryanair, this is positive news. Most of the leading American Express cards pay out cashback or rewards so using them to buy your flights is an easy way to build these up.
The American Express Platinum Cashback Everyday Card, for example, pays out a market-leading 5% on purchases, up to a maximum of £100 during the first three months.
There is also the Lloyds Duo Avios cards. If you open one of these you'll get two cards: an American Express and a MasterCard. You earn one Avios per £1 spent on the American Express card and one Avios per £5 spent on the MasterCard.
[SPOTLIGHT]American Express is also also offering 20,000 bonus Nectar points until November 6th on the American Express Nectar Credit Card. Therefore if you're looking for a new credit card, and you're a frequent flyer, one of these could be a good option.
Can Ryanair successfully win over the business market?
The budget airline has been phenomenally successful as the cheapest airline in Europe. The website revamp is a positive sign and will hopefully make the experience for customers easier and more transparent.
Creating social media profiles is another way Ryanair wants to utilise to become more accessible and approachable as a brand. But a week on in the Twitter world, its profile image still shows six women in their bikinis. Although Millar said the image was chosen from the airline’s charity calendar, to me it hardly represents the image of a modern company trying to attract a business audience.
The overarching association with the airline is also the poor levels of customer service passengers receive. The normal response with Ryanair is ‘you get what you pay for’ and there’s no denying that the flights are cheap. But when it comes to a business audience I think it’ll have a hard sell attracting a wave of new customers.
Unless it can offer something better, or much cheaper, than other companies it’s hard to see how it’ll beat the competition. Therefore it’ll be interesting to watch what it comes up with and how the company changes, if at all.