EasyJet expecting good fortune from Ryanair online woes

EasyJet is expecting a good return from a promotion which ran during ten hours Ryanair’s website was down for maintenance this week. EasyJet emailed several million customers alerting them to discounts of up to 10% on ten routes where easyJet competes directly with Ryanair. A spokesperson told Travolution: “This was very much a serious attempt…

EasyJet is expecting a good return from a promotion which ran during ten hours Ryanair‘s website was down for maintenance this week.

EasyJet emailed several million customers alerting them to discounts of up to 10% on ten routes where easyJet competes directly with Ryanair.

A spokesperson told Travolution: “This was very much a serious attempt to capitalise on Ryanairs down time.

“We havent got the exact figures yet but these promotions are always good for business, especially on the head-to-head routes.

The routes were also described as big summer routes and included Stansted to Faro, Liverpool to Ibiza and Edinburgh to Palma.

A secondary aim of the promotion was to alert easyJet customers to the apparent inconvenience Ryanair customers would suffer as a result.

“When we carry out maintenance on our stie we dont take the website down,” he said.

“For whatever reason, Ryanair had to do so, which gave us advance notice of the opportunity.”

He also pointed out that this was the second time recently that ryanair.com was taken offline.

The spokeperson added that EasyJet;s summer of love promotion, driven by posters and billboards in London and the South East, was helping its business to hold up during the current economic crisis.

He added that through the downturn were seeing a lot of people drop traditional flag carriers in favour of easyJet.

This shift coincides with BA’s launch this week of a fare calculator which compares the total cost of a BA fight to that of easyJet and Ryanair.

BA claims that Ryanair extras can add £375 to the cost of a return flight, while easyJet will cost an extra 79.

“We are not at all worried,” he said. “We worked with ITM Research and found that our fares are nearly 80% cheaper than BA’s.”

He added: “We also find it quite strange that BA is promoting a rival on the home page of their web site.

“As we said in a campaign we ran in the business travel magazine, free peanuts or pay peanuts. Its all about customer choice.”