For many travelers, it is a matter of course, and for airports, a significant source of revenue. Serving alcohol before flights, however, poses security problems for them, and after a number of incidents recently, one of the actors, Irish Ryanair, wants to see restrictions.
It's passengers who mix drugs with alcohol, but airport staff don't have to take the consequences when someone has a drink at 4 am, says Eddie Wilson, CEO of the airline division of the Ryanair group, when TT meets him at the company's headquarters in Dublin.
Several examples
He cites examples. As recently as a few days ago, a Polish passenger was fined 3,000 euros for misbehaving on board during a flight. In April, a plane with 177 passengers, originally from Agadir, Morocco, with a destination of Manchester, had to make an emergency landing in Portugal due to a violent and intoxicated passenger.
We want to see a limit at airports, says Eddie Wilson, and from Ryanair's perspective, the proposal has been a maximum of two beers or other forms of alcoholic beverages.
Many of our employees are young and have experienced, for example, sexual harassment. There have also been passengers who have tried to open the aircraft doors, he says.
The fact that the airline itself sells alcohol on board, Eddie Wilson believes is irrelevant since the personnel, unlike airport staff, say no if a passenger is about to cross the line.
The flight personnel are professionally trained and do not sell alcohol to passengers who cannot handle more. The person in the airport bar couldn't care less, "the problem" is coming from there.
Abolished air tax
On July 1, the air tax will be abolished in Sweden, and that news made Ryanair announce already last year that they are now betting on Sweden again, while Denmark, which is going in the opposite direction with introduced air tax, is being ruled out to an increasing extent. There are currently no concrete plans to compete on Swedish domestic routes. A challenge on the Swedish market is that while countries like Italy and Spain are back at higher traffic levels than before the pandemic, Sweden is only at 76 percent of the traffic then.
The fact that this is an effect of climate awareness among Swedes and the concept of flight shame, is not something Ryanair's CEO buys at all:
It's nonsense. Even when we ask passengers to offset their carbon footprint, nobody does it. The world has moved on, but that doesn't mean we care.
We're doing real things like buying new aircraft for nearly 40 dollars that are more fuel-efficient and can take more passengers. Those are "real things" we're doing.
The Irish low-cost airline was established in 1985 in Dublin.
During the deregulation of air travel in Europe in the 1990s, the company expanded rapidly. The business idea has largely been to fly to smaller airports outside major cities, resulting in lower costs.
The company also has a number of different bases around the continent, including London, which is the largest.
The company, and particularly its CEO Michael O'Leary, has over the years created attention with statements about, for example, charging passengers for toilet visits on board or introducing standing room to fit more passengers.
In recent years, they have run attention-grabbing campaigns via social media such as Tiktok to reach a younger generation.
