Ryanair to team up with Google in air ticket move

Google and Ryanair are set to team up to produce a new service which will revolutionise the way we buy airline tickets.

Ryanair chief Michael O’Leary said the service will launch before April and it will help customers get the cheapest flights on any route in the world.

“We’ll be sharing the Ryanair pricing through all of the Google outlets, so when you go in, there’ll be route selections, cheapest prices and so on,” he said.

The collaboration with Google is just one of the new online developments the low-cost airline is working on. The company’s website is getting a complete overhaul and in future all passengers will have individual profiles which Mr O’Leary said will allow the airline to target users with tailored special offers.

“We’ll build individual profiles for each passenger: we’ll know how often you fly; where you fly; who you fly with; and we’ll design a packages for you. For example, if you fly business 12 times a year, we’ll say something like, ‘If you fly 13 times, here’s a free ticket for your wife’,” he told the Sunday Independent.

Mr O’Leary also revealed what his plans for Aer Lingus would have been if he had been successful in any of his three take-over attempts. He had planned to keep the airline “middle class” and use it to fly into business airports across the continent “rather than in a field 50 miles outside of Venice”.

He doesn’t believe it is likely to happen now with the company’s stake in Aer Lingus under investigation in Britain and Europe.

Never one to keep his counsel, Mr O’Leary said that the Government has missed the opportunity to reform the public sector.

“Look at the private sector. It’s been transformed. Competitiveness has rocketed — but across the public sector there has still been no reform. The HSE is still a mess. The civil service hasn’t been reformed. There’s no productivity and nothing has been done,” he said.