Industry News

Ryanair’s travel and live events model a ‘natural fit’

Greg O’Gorman, director of ancillary services for Irish airline Ryanair, has described its recently-launched Ryanair Tickets service as a “natural fit” with travel, according to Pollstar.

The low-cost airline last week partnered with ticketing agency Coras to launch its events ticketing arm, in which Ryanair customers can now buy tickets for theatre, music and sporting events across Europe on the website.

Ryanair travels to 30 countries across Europe and claims to transport 130 million passengers per annum, 30 million of which have personal Ryanair accounts.

Customers can purchase tickets for all events in seven languages, which are English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Polish, as well as in three currencies – the Euro, Sterling and Zloty.

“We can trigger an email to everybody who is traveling into London during certain [event] dates and be extremely targeted in a way nobody else can,” O’Gorman said.

He added: “We know where customers are going and when they’re traveling. We don’t have to buy that information via PPC from Google, which is what Amazon, Ticketmaster and all the rest have to do.”

“We started with theatre and concerts. We’ll have rugby tickets available soon, and it’s an obvious extension to get into other sports events like football,” said O’Gorman.

“Music festivals are a good fit for us as well, as were obviously moving people around Europe, to the European capitals, where there’s lots of music festivals, particularly in the summer.”

The airline’s live music line-up starts with London’s ‘Live at Chelsea’ series, working with concert promoter DEAG’s Kilimanjaro.

A resale platform is “not currently” part of Ryanair’s offering, but “that could be something further down the line,” O’Gorman said.

“Typically we’ll have a target for hitting the capacity levels of our flights. The theatres and venues should also be looking at it the same way, which is: they’ve got a finite opportunity to sell all the seats for that show that evening. They should be really targeting the sell-though and adjusting the price to ensure that they’re on track,” O’Gorman said.

“That gives an opportunity to start with the lower price and see how the demand is going. As you get closer to the event date you’ve got the opportunity to start yielding those prices higher.”

Ryanair’s ‘Always Getting Better’ programme is behind the ticketing move in its fourth year of the initiative. It also includes a personalised website, a new Ryanair Rooms website, Apple Pay integration, long-haul Air Europa flights on sale on Ryanair.com and a new partnership with the Erasmus Student Network.

Image: Andy Mitchell