Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 31st of March.

Ryanair has just announced it's carried 200 million passengers over the course of a year.

A good moment then to catch up with Michael O'Leary, who's been chief executive of the Irish airline for the

past 31 years. I spoke to him at the A4E, that's Airlines for Europe, conference in Brussels.

And I started with, well, is he going to call it a day and retire to his farm in Mollinger in Central Ireland,

having turned a failing small airline into the biggest carrier in Europe?

You've just turned 64.

Surely you can put your feet up in Mollingar and think, yeah, I did an all right job.

No, we're on a mission to get to

300 million pastors by 2034. We have to take delivery of 350, 336 more aircraft from Boeing,

and we are well on track to get to 300 million by 2034. We're not stopping at 200 million. We

didn't stop at 100 million. We're going forward for

intergalactic domination and we're never going to stop. For the first time, Ryanair is aiming

at frequent flyers with a scheme called Ryanair Prime. You told me you'd never bring in a loyalty scheme.

It's not a loyalty scheme. It's a subscription discount scheme. So we're selling 250,000

Ryanair Prime subscriptions in the next year. The cost of 79 euros. And we think we will deliver

12 monthly seat sales, which will save those subscribers more than 300 euros over the cost of our

airfares in our system.

So we're testing it.

I'm not sure whether it'll succeed or not,

but it will deliver real value to consumers,

and it's not based on loyalty.

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