Nicely does it – Ryanair is richly rewarded for its transformation

This time last year Ryanair’s conversion to being nice seemed an unlikely if relatively straightforward morality tale. Boss Michael O’Leary had repented his pennypinching and potty-mouthed ways; customers were no longer to be fleeced for an extra bag or for forgetting to print a boarding pass; and the Scrooge in charge was no longer crying humbug about the internet and Twitter.

In the Dickens version, doing good becomes an end in itself for the transformed Ebenezer: “His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.” But in the Irish airline’s story, what happened next would have delighted a miserly Scrooge: being nice has seen profits soar with huge windfalls for shareholders. This modern Christmas Carol sees the hero ever more loaded, even now that Tiny Tim can carry his crutch on to the plane for free.

And after years of berating the bleeding hearts, O’Leary hired former moneysupermarket.com and Tesco marketing executive Kenny Jacobs to become the smiley public face of a newly cuddly airline.

Ryanair was, says Jacobs, “cheap and nasty”. But he resists talk of being “nice” – the shorthand used by his boss for the airline’s transformation. “I’m not sure we’re quite nice yet.” But they’ve definitely toned down the aggro: “There was a lot of antagonism between Ryanair and its customers that didn’t need to be there. In the past year we’ve just absolutely taken that away.”

Jacobs is frank about the experience many passengers could relate to. It was, he says: “I’m going with Ryanair [so] you’d better be ready for it, know the rules, pack this way, be there at this time, watch out for this and that – and when it’s boarding time, that scrum, if you’ve got your kids with you, what do you do?”

After a year in the job he reckons that has changed: “The fear factor, the antagonism has gone – and that’s made a huge difference.”

Changes such as allocated seating, he says, together with an accessible website, curbing punitive charges and relaxing baggage rules have filtered through to the public. YouGov polling for the airline shows 30% more people now say they would happily fly Ryanair.

Now, he says, the emphasis is on “getting smarter [rather] than nicer … us being gushing and the most wonderful flight you’ve ever had, that’s not our territory. It’ll always be stripped back. It was cheap and nasty. Now it’s cheap and straightforward and smart. We’re one of those savvy brands: H&M, Hyundai, Primark – there’s no shame in that for us, that’s who we compare ourselves to.”

Jacobs’ inside story of Ryanair’s year of change starts with his interview for the job. He didn’t have to convince O’Leary that Ryanair needed to transform its image: “That was bleedin’ obvious.”

The essentials of the new brand were written on a sheet of A4. “Michael had made up his mind that he wanted to be nice and had a list of things he wanted someone to come in and implement.”

Jacobs added some ideas of his own: the infamous Ryanair crew calendar was scrapped at that interview.

They had to “wipe the board clean”, he says, and with the charity calendars the airline was unnecessarily closing down its own customer base. “When you’re raising money through a girls-in-bikinis product, it’s got a limited audience.”

That decision prompted “a few complaints from wannabe models”, he says with a grin, but otherwise staff were keen to change. Within a month of Jacobs’ arrival, town hall-style meetings were held at corporate HQ in Dublin. “We put up a slide saying this is what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. For people who had been there a while, there was a bit of eye-rubbing – we’re really going to do this: launch an app and not charge people for it, launch a family product, scrap the calendar?”

Some of the transformation could be implemented from head office, but he adds: “Where the rubber hits the road is 6,000 crew, 1,600 flights a day: it does come down to the flight experience.”

Changing the staff culture is under way: the first retraining programmes, for about 70 senior cabin crew and base supervisors at a time, started in November at Stansted and Dublin.

“If you go back to old Ryanair – in the queue, no allocated seat, wearing two jackets, packing your handbag into your case – you didn’t enjoy that, but the crew didn’t either. Now, taking off, you don’t have this grumpy crew versus grumpy passengers.”

O’Leary himself took little persuading in the new-fangled methods, from the crew training to hiring a generation of developers for a new department named Ryanair Labs and adopting recruitment, data and marketing tools that Jacobs says had taken too long to reach Ryanair’s Dublin HQ. “Ryanair at management meetings is probably talking about things that it didn’t talk about before: the blinkered view of ‘this is the way we do it’ is now gone.”

The internal company mantra is Always Getting Better – the “north star” in Jacobs’ management-speak. “I kind of had to take Michael through that, but he loves the fact it’s the umbrella we put up, and a core value in Ryanair.”

Targeted mass emails – about 20m a week – have had high rates of conversion into customer bookings, almost 10%, claims Jacobs. Marketing spend and some other costs have gone up but are more than balanced by extra tickets sold to keep costs per passenger stable.

Fuller planes and even healthier balance sheets will have helped sweep away doubts for the results-driven – and immensely personally rich – O’Leary. “He loves new Ryanair. He’s a big shareholder and he sees it in the numbers too: it’s easy to love it because of the net margins.”

O’Leary remains very visible on the shop floor at Ryanair HQ, even if he has kept some of the more colourful aspects of his personality from public view in the last 18 months. But Jacobs hints that the boss may soon make a welcome return to the fray.

The cultural change may hasten the airline’s next big strategic change: Ryanair has made no secret of its low-cost long-haul ambitions, but with investors in America warming to its reincarnation, Jacobs says transatlantic flights may come even sooner than expected.

Getting the necessary wide-body aircraft remains the sticking point in linking Dublin to east coast US the Ryanair way, but the airline’s vast cash reserves mean it may yet jump the queue of international competitors for Airbus A350s or Boeing 787s. “It would need to be a cancellation from one of the big Gulf carriers – a Dreamliner or an A350. But three years out, it’s possible, yeah.”

Does he ever feel a pang of regret for the Ryanair past, the loudmouthed, customer-baiting, truculent misanthropes of old? Jacobs doesn’t pause. “I don’t think anyone will miss the way we used to be. But I guess a few of the lads might miss the calendar.”