November 11th - Ryanair is about to insist that everyone uses a smartphone boarding pass*
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(* Though, as Dara Brady, Chief Marketing Officer of Europe’s biggest budget airline has been telling me, if you need a boarding pass printed out at the airport staff will do that for free, so long as you have already checked in online.)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Tuesday the 11th of November, |
| 0:06.2 | which means that we are on the eve of a really dramatic move by Ryanair. You will be aware |
| 0:13.4 | that Europe's biggest budget airline is the company that about 15, 20 years ago said, |
| 0:20.0 | everybody's going to check in online. And people |
| 0:22.6 | said, well, that'll never work then, will it? Now, EasyJet, sorry, now Ryanair is saying, |
| 0:27.9 | you are going to have to use the app if you want to board one of our flights. You will no longer |
| 0:35.0 | be able to check in online and print out your boarding pass. |
| 0:38.2 | We want to go one step further. |
| 0:40.5 | So Dara Brady, who is the chief marketing officer for Ryanair, |
| 0:44.2 | is going kindly to tell us more about it. |
| 0:47.0 | Dara, what's the big idea? |
| 0:49.3 | Look, we think ultimately this new initiative essentially |
| 0:52.3 | will be a much improved customer experience for the last |
| 0:55.8 | remaining passengers that are still using paper we already had pre-the-announcement 80% of our |
| 1:01.7 | passengers were using the app for travel that's gone up to about 90% in advance while people are |
| 1:07.3 | already making the migration over and the last last few will migrate when we go tomorrow. |
| 1:13.1 | So, like, ultimately, there's a couple of reasons behind this, |
| 1:16.1 | and again, we're very conscious of you. |
| 1:17.6 | We alluded to two in the opening, |
| 1:19.1 | when we brought in online check-in, everybody again said, |
| 1:22.0 | oh, this won't work, this will be a problem, this is anti-everybody. |
| 1:25.9 | And again, 99.9% of people check in online and have no difficulty. |
... |
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