Missing the Flight
Seasoned travellers on Ryanair know the form. Unless you are lucky (?) enough to be travelling with small children, then it’s just one big bundle for seats when the doors open and last man on gets the rubbish middle seat in the back row (next to the small children).
Leave it too long, of course, and you might miss the flight altogether.
The current climate change campaign being run by Ryanair’s charismatic Michael O’Leary is the equivalent of falling asleep in the departure lounge while the rest of the passengers climb aboard.
This isn’t a gripe at O’Leary. The man has done more for broadening travel horizons than anyone since the original Thomas Cook invented tourism. And when he did it with a sustained campaign of having a go David and Goliath style at incumbent airlines, airport operators, and protectionist governments, many in the travelling public cheered at this straight talking consumer champion.
Unfortunately the same techniques don’t work quite so well when the campaign target seems to be the planet itself.
Of course O’Leary is right that airlines are pretty insignificant in CO2 terms (although the emission figures are growing rapidly). There’s also more than a suspicion that the largely middle-class green lobby has it in for cheap flights because it clutters up ‘nice’ destinations with plebs and spoils that charming little bistro in the Dordogne that used to be so authentic, darling.
Unfortunately, part of the art of good corporate communications is to learn that on some issues, you need to accept the need for changes and take the lead on delivering them. The airlines have got to accept that they are in the firing-line, take a share of the responsibility, and show that they are responding. There are some issues for which the old maxim applies – ‘If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem’. Climate change is now one of them.
Being positive about the need to take action on climate change and recommending the best ways to tackle the problem will get more results in the end than any number of press ads telling the government to take a running jump. Eventually, airlines who don’t demonstrate they are taking climate change seriously will start to alienate not just governments and opinion formers, but some of their customers.
Ryanair has done a fantastic job for consumers, Michael. But wake up before the plane doors close.