Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 28th of August.

Arguably, the most successful figure in the whole aviation industry is Michael O'Leary.

He took over as chief executive of a small Irish regional airline called Ryanair in 1994.

Since then, it has, as you will have spotted, grown to become by far the biggest

budget airline in Europe. This year it will fly over 200 million passengers and it has big

expansion plans with 340 new aircraft on order.

So it's always good to catch up with Michael and I've been tackling a series of issues with him.

I looked at the entry exit system due to start on the 12th of October.

What about Ryanair's plan in November to do away with paper boarding passes and expect

everybody to turn up with their smartphone?

And first of all, the free baggage limit on Ryanair recently increased to 40 by 30 by 20 centimetres.

But, says Michael O'Leary, he is going to be ensuring people adhere to the limit.

We're desperately trying to get that last point one of a percent.

99.9.9% of Ryanair pastures comply with the bag rules, no issues. That 1.1 of a percent, we need to get rid of them. We need to get rid of those big bags. Everybody has to play by the rules and then there'll be no issues. But we are going to continue to catch more people because our staff at the gates are, we're incentivizing them now. They get paid one euro 50 for any oversized bag they find.

We're going to increase out to two euros 50 from probably November, mainly because they're

finding less and less oversized bags because more and more people are compliant with the rules.

And the more we can do that and eliminate that, the faster the boarding will be, the quicker

the turnerance will be and the more efficient overall Ryanair will be and we'll keep passing on those efficiencies in the form of low fares. Talking of efficiencies, from November the 3rd, you are planning to make it mandatory for everybody to turn up with a digital boarding process. We're getting rid of the paper boarding passes, yeah. How's that going to work? Not everyone's got a smart going. Well, actually, they actually, I mean, they practically do at this point in time. At the moment, between 85 and 90% of passengers show up with the smartphones. Almost 100% of passengers have the smartphones. And we want to move everybody onto that, the smartphone technology. I think it'll be the same way. There'll be some teetting problems. The big concern that people have is what happens if I lose my battery or I lose my phone.

If you lose your phone, no issue. As long as you've checked in before you got to the airport, we'll reissue a paper boarding pass at the airport free of charge. But you have to have checked in before you got to the airport. Also, if your battery dies or something happens, we'll have you, once you've checked in, we'll have your sequence number anyway at the boarding gate. we'll take you you'll get on. So nobody should worry about it. Just make sure you check in on the line before you get to the airport and then all will be fine. But there are some airports where you're still going to need a paper boarding car because that's the local rules. In Morocco and Albania, but we've reached agreement with the Albanian authorities now that from next March, they're going digital as well. The Moroccans still insist on paper.

And in those cases, we'll accept paper voting passes.

Final question. 12th of October, entry-exit system begins. How worried are you that it's all going to go wrong in the manner of many other IT?

I am pretty certain it's going to go wrong. I am pretty certain that border control here in the UK and also at many European airports will not be able to accommodate at the backlog of queues. But the advantage we have is it's October and we're moving into the winter period so there's a lot less pressure on. But I think it will be bumpy and lumpy through the winter. And hopefully either by increased staffing or better systems systems it will have worked its way out of the system by the time we get to next summer.

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