Should Ryanair Lose Their License To Operate?

Editor’s Note: This editorial draws on more than 25 years of independent travel, first-hand experience and publicly documented evidence and regulatory changes. Many of these editorials were written years before the issues became mainstream, and have been updated to reflect current developments while remaining true to their original arguments.

Should Ryanair Lose Its Licence To Operate?

In September 2017, Ryanair announced that it would cancel thousands of flights over a six-week period because of a spectacular failure in pilot rostering and leave allocation. Around 700,000 passengers saw their travel plans thrown into chaos almost overnight. Holidays were cancelled, business trips were abandoned and families were left scrambling for alternative flights, often at significant personal expense.

For many people, it was the moment Ryanair’s reputation finally caught up with it.

But the more I watched the story unfold, the more I became convinced that the cancellations themselves were not the real issue. Operational failures happen. Every airline suffers delays, cancellations and unexpected disruption from time to time. What separates a good airline from a bad one is not whether things go wrong, but how it treats passengers afterwards. And Ryanair’s response to the crisis felt depressingly familiar.

Because this was never just about one rostering mistake.

Budget airlines are a good thing. Let’s get that straight from the start. They allow us to travel cheaply, they have opened up wider travel to millions of people and they have changed the way Europe moves. No one can seriously argue that low-cost aviation has not made travel more accessible. In that respect, I have no problem with Ryanair or with the no-frills model itself.

The problem is what Ryanair has too often tried to smuggle in under the cover of that model.

Running a no-frills airline does not remove your legal obligations. It does not remove your moral responsibility to treat passengers fairly. And it certainly does not excuse misleading customers about their rights, resisting legitimate claims or treating regulatory intervention as just another cost of doing business.

The warning signs were already there long before the 2017 cancellations. Ryanair had repeatedly been criticised for poor customer service, including being named by Which? readers in 2013 as the worst brand for customer service. Its own much-publicised customer service overhaul, the “Always Getting Better” programme, was widely reported as an attempt to soften a reputation that had become toxic enough for the airline to promise it would stop “unnecessarily pissing people off.” Even then, the underlying attitude never seemed to disappear for long.

By 2017, passengers were already complaining about being split up from travelling companions unless they paid extra to choose seats, while Ryanair denied changing its policy despite repeatedly being caught in a lie about it. Around the same period, the airline also introduced new cabin baggage rules that meant passengers without priority boarding could no longer take a wheelie-size bag into the cabin, a policy that again fed the sense that every basic expectation was being turned into another chargeable inconvenience.

That context matters, because the 2017 cancellations did not come out of nowhere. They landed on top of years of passenger frustration and a public image Ryanair had largely created for itself.

So when Ryanair’s rostering failure caused mass disruption, the question was never simply whether the airline had made one spectacular operational mistake. The bigger question was whether this was the latest example of a company culture that had spent years treating passengers less like customers and more like obstacles to be managed.

The 2017 Cancellations Were Not Just Bad Planning

The 2017 cancellations were, on the surface, a catastrophic operational failure. Ryanair had mismanaged pilot leave, rostering and scheduling so badly that it was forced to cancel thousands of flights across its network. And for ‘mismanaged’, read ‘half their pilot work force walking out when they didn’t have enough to cover routes in the first place’, Ryanair simply cancelled more than 18,000 flights with no warning or notice, affecting over 400,000 passengers.

The first wave affected hundreds of thousands of passengers, and the later extension of cancellations pushed the total disruption to around 700,000 passengers. Holidays were ruined, trips were abandoned, families were split between impossible choices and travellers were left trying to find alternative flights at short notice, often when prices had already surged.

That alone was bad enough, but it was not the real scandal. Airlines can suffer operational failures. They should not happen on that scale, but they can happen.

What really matters then is how an airline responds, and Ryanair’s response exposed exactly why so many passengers and consumer advocates had already lost patience with the company long before the first cancellation notice landed in anyone’s inbox.

After the initial anger and confusion, tensions rose as Ryanair essentially tried to wriggle out of their responsibilities and even downright mislead affected passengers, a fact that has been repeatedly exposed, and has even forced the Civil Aviation Authority to finally get off their backsides and admit they may have to do their job.

They essentially flat out accused Ryanair of repeatedly misleading passengers about their rights, particularly around rerouting. Passengers were not simply entitled to a refund if their flight was cancelled; they were entitled to be offered rerouting, and that could include being placed on another airline where necessary. The CAA had to intervene and demand that Ryanair correct its information, explain passenger options properly and stop giving travellers the impression that their rights were narrower than they actually were.

That should never have been necessary. Ryanair was not a small carrier caught off guard by an obscure technicality. It was, and remains, one of Europe’s largest airlines. It knew exactly what its legal obligations were under EU261 at the time. Yet at the moment passengers most needed clarity, the regulator had to step in and tell the airline to explain basic rights it should have been applying automatically.

Eventually, after being forced to, Ryanair did issue clarification to affected customers, setting out their rights to refunds, rerouting on Ryanair or other comparable transport options, and reasonable expenses. But that only underlines the point. Those rights did not suddenly appear because the CAA got involved. They existed from the start. The fact that Ryanair had to be pushed into making them clear is not evidence of a system working smoothly; it is evidence of a system that was already failing passengers until a regulator threatened action.

At the time, many people dismissed the episode as a spectacular management failure. I was not convinced. Not because the rostering failure was insignificant, but because the response felt so familiar. Ryanair had spent years cultivating a reputation for aggressive policies, poor customer care and a willingness to push passengers as far as it could. The cancellations did not create that reputation. They exposed it on a scale too large to ignore.

The real issue was never simply that Ryanair cancelled flights. It was that, when the disruption happened, passengers were once again left fighting for clarity, care and legal rights from an airline that should have provided them without hesitation. That is why 2017 still matters. It was not just a bad week for Ryanair’s operations department. It was a warning about what happens when an airline treats passenger rights as something to be managed after the fact rather than honoured from the beginning.

The Problem Was Never Just One Crisis

If the 2017 cancellations had genuinely marked a turning point, Ryanair would have made a real change and the mass cancellations could have been remembered as an expensive lesson learned. But that is not what happened.

Instead, the years that followed became a catalogue of further disputes, legal challenges and regulatory interventions that all pointed towards the same uncomfortable conclusion: the 2017 cancellations were not an isolated failure. They were part of a much larger pattern.

After the CAA’s ruling that Ryanair had been misleading passengers about their rights, forcing them to publicly clarify passengers’ entitlement to refunds, rerouting on other airlines where appropriate and reimbursement of reasonable expenses, Ryanair continued to flout the law and refuse to comply with EU261 legislation. In 2018, Ryanair refused to compensate thousands of passengers whose flights had been cancelled because of staff strikes, arguing that industrial action by its own employees amounted to ‘extraordinary circumstances’ and therefore fell outside the compensation rules. The Civil Aviation Authority disagreed and took the airline to court. Ryanair lost in the High Court, lost again in the Court of Appeal in 2022, and eventually abandoned its appeal to the Supreme Court, finally accepting that affected passengers were entitled to compensation. Years of litigation, probably costing more than any compensation would have, had achieved nothing except delaying justice for passengers who should never have had to fight that battle in the first place.

Even now, nearly a decade after the 2017 cancellations, the pattern has not disappeared.

In June 2026, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority launched an investigation into Ryanair’s so-called ‘mandatory family seat’ policy, examining whether parents were effectively being forced to pay simply to comply with the airline’s own child safety obligations. Within weeks, Ryanair abandoned the policy and agreed to allow parents to sit with their children free of charge, although the investigation itself continues.

Only days later, Austria’s Supreme Court ruled against fourteen separate clauses in Ryanair’s terms and conditions, finding a range of additional charges unlawful, including fees for airport check-in, boarding pass printing, infant bookings and certain name changes. Consumer groups argued that the ruling could open the door for passengers to reclaim fees they had already paid.

Look at those examples together. Different years. Different countries. Different regulators. Different courts. Different consumer issues. And yet they all point in exactly the same direction.

Viewed individually, each case can be explained away as a disagreement over regulation, an isolated legal dispute or another unfortunate misunderstanding with a watchdog. Viewed together, they paint a very different picture. They suggest a company that has repeatedly flouted and ignored the law, pushed consumer protection rules to their limits, accepted regulatory intervention as an occupational hazard because they know any fines will be cheaper than complying with the law, and continued operating with remarkably little evidence of any fundamental cultural change.

At what point does a long history of regulatory investigations, court defeats and consumer protection interventions stop looking like bad luck and start looking like a business model?

When Does Bad Behaviour Become A Business Model?

This is where the question becomes much bigger than Ryanair being annoying, aggressive or unpleasant to deal with. Those things may damage its reputation, but they are not the reason an operating licence should ever come under scrutiny. The real issue is whether an airline can repeatedly push past the limits of consumer law, wait for regulators or courts to drag it back into line, and still treat the whole process as an acceptable cost of doing business.

Because that is the pattern.

Passenger rights are not supposed to be optional until enforced. Rerouting obligations are not supposed to become clear only after the CAA intervenes. Compensation is not supposed to be withheld until the Court of Appeal confirms what passengers were entitled to all along. Charges and contract terms are not supposed to be pushed onto customers until consumer groups or courts force a rethink.

Yet again and again, Ryanair appears to test the boundary first and deal with the consequences later.

That is not just poor customer service. It is not just another ugly headline. It is a business culture that seems to understand one brutal commercial truth: if enough passengers give up, if enforcement takes long enough, and if the final penalty is manageable, then flouting the rules can still be profitable.

That is where regulation has failed. A watchdog that only steps in after passengers have already been misled, delayed, refused or overcharged is not preventing misconduct. It is documenting it. And if the consequences never seriously threaten the airline’s ability to keep operating as before, then the message is obvious.

Break the rules first. Correct course only when forced. Carry on.

At that point, bad behaviour has stopped being an exception. It has become part of the model.

What Is An Airline Licence Actually For?

An airline licence should mean more than permission to put aircraft in the sky. It should be a privilege granted to a company trusted to carry millions of passengers, take their money, control their journeys and operate within a legal framework designed to protect the public when things go wrong.

Safety is obviously the first requirement, but safety cannot be the only standard that matters. If an airline can repeatedly mislead passengers, resist compensation, ignore rerouting obligations, push unlawful terms, wait for regulators to intervene and still carry on with no serious threat to its ability to operate, then the licence is not functioning as a standard. It is functioning as cover.

Because what is the point of licensing an airline if the licence has no meaningful relationship with how that airline treats the people it carries?

A company that repeatedly flouts consumer law should not be able to hide behind the fact that its aircraft are technically safe to fly. Passenger protection is not some decorative extra bolted onto aviation regulation for appearances. It is part of the public trust that comes with being allowed to operate an airline in the first place.

If repeated failures to comply with consumer protection law never place that privilege at risk, then the licence itself begins to lose its meaning. At that point, it is not a serious regulatory standard. It is just paperwork with wings.

What Is The Point Of A Regulator Without Real Power?

And that leads to the bigger question. What is the point of a regulator if the worst offenders do not genuinely fear it?

A regulator should not exist simply to mop up after the damage has already been done. It should not be reduced to issuing statements, accepting undertakings, chasing compliance years later or watching passengers carry the burden until a court finally confirms what the law already said. That is not protection. That is paperwork after the event.

Regulation should terrify companies that repeatedly break the rules. It should make the consequences so severe that no airline boardroom can treat non-compliance as a calculated risk. Fines should not be loose change. They should be large enough to threaten profits, shake investors, force resignations, change boardroom behaviour and, in the worst cases, put the airline’s ability to operate at risk.

That is what deterrence means.

The worst offenders should be made examples of. Not because regulators should be vindictive, but because the rest of the industry needs to see what happens when an airline repeatedly ignores passenger rights, misleads customers or only complies after being dragged there. One serious sanction against a major airline would do more to change industry behaviour than another decade of polite warnings and carefully worded undertakings.

Because if an airline can repeatedly be investigated, repeatedly be challenged, repeatedly lose in court, repeatedly change behaviour only after pressure and still continue as before, what lesson is the rest of the industry supposed to learn?

The answer is obvious: push first, comply later, and only when forced.

That is a regulatory failure.

The purpose of regulation is not to punish after the damage has already been done. It is to make breaking the rules a worse commercial decision than following them. Until that balance changes, passenger rights will continue to exist more convincingly in legislation than they do at the departure gate.

Cheap Flights Do Not Excuse Contempt For Passengers

Cheap flights are not the enemy. Budget airlines have changed travel for the better in many ways, and Ryanair has played a huge role in that. Millions of people have taken trips they might never have afforded otherwise because low-cost airlines broke open routes, lowered fares and made short breaks across Europe feel normal rather than luxurious. That matters. Affordable travel matters.

But cheap fares are not a moral shield.

A £9.99 ticket does not give an airline permission to mislead passengers about their rights. A no-frills fare does not mean customer care can be stripped down to nothing. A low-cost model does not excuse resisting lawful compensation, pushing passengers toward the cheapest possible option for the airline, or treating legal obligations as if they only apply once a regulator, court or sufficiently informed customer forces the issue.

No one is asking Ryanair to become Singapore Airlines. No one expects silver service, endless legroom, complimentary champagne or a red carpet at the boarding gate. Passengers who book a budget airline know what they are buying. They know the seat will be basic, the extras will cost more and the airport may not always be exactly where the marketing suggests it is.

But there is a vast difference between no-frills and no responsibility.

That is the line Ryanair has crossed too often. Not because it charges for extras. Not because it packs passengers in. Not because its brand is abrasive. Those things may irritate people, but they are not the real issue. The real issue is when an airline uses the low-cost model as cover for a deeper contempt: contempt for passengers who do not know their rights, contempt for regulators without enough teeth, and contempt for a legal framework it appears willing to test until someone forces it back into line.

That is not budget travel. That is exploitation wrapped in a cheap fare.

And passengers need to stop pretending the bargain is always worth it. Every time we shrug and say, “Well, it was only cheap,” we help normalise the idea that low fares justify lower standards of treatment. They do not. The price of a ticket should never decide whether passengers are treated lawfully, honestly or with basic human respect.

Low fares are not a licence to flout the law.

So, Should Ryanair Lose Its Licence To Operate?

If an airline repeatedly misleads passengers, resists lawful compensation, pushes consumer protection rules to breaking point, ignores regulators until forced to comply and treats the consequences as a manageable cost of doing business, then yes, its licence should absolutely be on the table.

Not as a stunt. Not as a headline-grabbing punishment. Not because one operational failure, one legal dispute or one unpopular policy should be enough to ground a major airline overnight. But because a licence to operate should mean something. It should be a privilege that depends on more than keeping aircraft mechanically safe and balance sheets profitable. It should depend on whether an airline can be trusted to obey the law, respect passengers and meet the obligations that come with carrying millions of people every year.

Ryanair should have faced far more serious consequences in 2017. Not a token fine. Not a mild rebuke. Not another round of undertakings and clarifications. The cancellation crisis was unprecedented, the treatment of passengers was unacceptable, and the response from regulators should have been severe enough to send a shockwave through the entire airline industry.

That did not happen.

And because it did not happen, the lesson was obvious. Push hard. Apologise if necessary. Fight the regulator. Lose in court if you must. Change only what you are forced to change. Carry on.

That is why this question still matters years later. Ryanair is not just one airline with a difficult reputation. It is a test case for whether consumer protection in aviation has any real force behind it. If one of Europe’s largest airlines can be repeatedly challenged by regulators, repeatedly criticised by passengers, repeatedly dragged through legal disputes and still operate as normal with no serious threat to its licence, then what exactly is the system protecting?

Because it does not look like it is protecting passengers.

A serious regulator would use the worst offenders to send a message to the rest of the industry. It would make clear that customer care is not optional, passenger rights are not negotiable and legal obligations are not a game to be played until the referee finally blows the whistle. It would make the punishment so severe that no airline boardroom would ever again treat flouting consumer law as a rational commercial decision.

Will that happen?

Probably not.

Ryanair will most likely continue to do what Ryanair has always done: absorb the outrage, fight the rules, tweak the policy, trumpet the fares and wait for passengers to come back the moment another cheap flight appears on the screen. And many passengers will come back, because price is powerful, memories are short and the promise of a bargain can make even the worst treatment feel temporarily acceptable.

That is the most damning part of all.

Ryanair keeps getting away with it because the system lets it, regulators hesitate and passengers keep rewarding the model they complain about. If we want better, that has to change. Regulators need to stop treating licence sanctions as unthinkable, airlines need to learn that passenger rights are not optional, and travellers need to stop pretending that a cheap fare is worth any level of contempt.

Because if an airline can only compete by pushing the law, abusing trust and treating passengers as disposable, then maybe the real question is not whether it should lose its licence.

Maybe the real question is why it still has one.