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THE STORY SO FAR

How we're getting there
Low Fares and friendly, efficient service - that's our way. And how do we do it? Rigorous cost management. Landing in airports that don't rip you off. Free seats when we're feeling generous. No frills on your flight - but we'll sell you food, drink and gifts. Punchy advertising that sometimes gets us in trouble. And we take on the High Fares guys when they try to block our routes and airport management when they want to charge us too much.

What we've done so far
Over the past ten years we've increased our annual traffic from under 700,000 to over 15 million passengers. Along the way we changed the face of air travel, broke hire fare cartels, rocked airport monoplies and made it possible for millions to travel.

Milestones, Millstones and Monopolies
Milestones for us, millstones for our competitors and monoplies that needed to be broken. If only they taught history like this at school.

1985 - We started with a 15 seater turbo prop going from the south east of Ireland (Waterford) to London-Gatwick. Today, the plane wouldn't big enough to carry the management team around.

1986 - Inspired by the story David and Goliath, we go after the big guys for a slice of the action and end up smashing the Aer Lingus / British Airways high-fare cartel on the Dublin-London route. With two routes under our belts we carry 82,000 passengers in the year. Of course, we had to buy two more turbo prop BA 768 planes to do it.

1990/91 - Well, we're pretty good at getting the passengers onto our planes but not so hot on managing our costs. We're losing money, so a new management team is brought in to sort it out. We re-launch as a "low fares / no frills" airline, closely modelling the Southwest Airlines model in the US. The rest is pretty much history.

1995 - Happy 10th Birthday to us. And we've plenty to celebrate. By now, we're now the biggest passenger carrier on Dublin-London route, the largest Irish airline on every route we operate and we've carried 2.25 million passengers in the year.

1997 - This is the year the EU fully deregulated the air business, enabling us to open new routes to Continental Europe. We launched services to Stockholm, Oslo, Paris and Brussels. And we took time out to float Ryanair plc on Dublin and NASDAQ Stock exchanges.

1998 - Forget your fifteen-seater turbo props. This year we put in a US$2billion order for up 45 new Boeing 737-800 series aircraft. We're voted Airline of the Year by the Irish Transport Users Committee and voted Best Managed National Airline by International Aviation Week magazine. Over the next few years we get used to these awards but we stick with our cost focus.

2000 - Well, if there was anyone going to make money out of a dot com business, who better than Ryanair? After much deliberation, and watching others burn up money, we jump onto the internet with the launch of our new online booking site: ryanair.com. Within three months the site is taking over 50,000 bookings a week.

2001 - It's the first birthday for ryanair.com and again something to celebrate. Our new baby now accounts for 75% of overall bookings. We also start operations at our European base in Brussels Charleroi.

2002 - We open Frankfurt-Hahn as our second continental European base and announce a long-term partnership with Boeing which will see us acquiring up to 150 new Boeing 737-800 series aircraft over an eight year period from 2002 to 2010. Today our web accounts for 94% of our bookings - probably something to do with opening another 26 routes this year.

2003 - Is characterized by rapid expansion. We start the year by announcing we've ordered an additional 100 new Boeing 737-800 series aircraft to facilitate our rapid European growth plans. We acquired Buzz the from KLM in April and relaunched 13 buzz routes in May. In February we open our first base in Italy at Milan-Bergamo, and in April we launch our Stockholm Skavsta base in Sweden, with six new European routes. In all 60 new routes are added throughout 2003 to bring us a total of 127 routes.

2004 - We are named the most popular airline on the web for 2003 by Google. We launch our 10th and 11th bases in Rome Ciampino and Barcelona Girona, and we continue to add more routes to our already extensive network. In February Ryanair passed out British Airways to become the UK's favourite airline in UK/Europe.

Ryanair now has 12 bases and 220 routes that cover 95 destinations across 19 European countries.

DESTINATIONS:

AUSTRIA: Graz, Klagenfurt, Salzburg

BELGIUM: Bruxelles Charleroi, Ostend Bruges

DENMARK: Aahrus, Esbjerg

UK : Birmingham, Blackpool, Bristol, Bounemouth, Leeds Bradford
Liverpool, London Stantead, Gatwick,Luton, Manchester, Newcastle, Newquay,
Teesside.

FRANCE: Bergerac Biarritz Brest Carcassonne Clermont-Ferrand Dinard
La Rochelle Limoges Montpellier Nimes Paris-Beauvais Pau Perpignan
Poitiers Reims-Champagne Rodez St. Etienne Tours Disneyland

FINLAND: Tampere

GERMANY: Karlsruhe Baden Leipzig-Altenburg Berlin-Schonefeld
Dusseldorf (NRN) Frankfurt-Hahn Hamburg-Lubeck Friedrichshafen

HOLLAND: Eindhoven Groningen Maastricht

IRELAND: Cork Derry Dublin Kerry Knock Shannon

ITALY: Alghero Ancona Bologna (Forli) Genoa Milan-Bergamo Palermo Pescara Pisa Rome (Ciampino) Trieste Turin Venice Treviso Verona Brescia

SPAIN: Barcelona-Girona Jerez Malaga Murcia Reus Valladolid

PORTUGAL: Faro

NORWAY: Haugesund Oslo-Torp

SCOTLAND: Aberdeen Glasgow-Prestwick Edinburgh

SWEDEN: Gothenburg Malmo Stockholm (VST) Stockholm (NYO)
WALES: Cardiff


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