Ryanair is ending its annual paid membership program, after finding that members actually took advantage of the savings being offered. That’s quite an explanation…
In this post:
Ryanair claims it’s losing money on Prime memberships
In early 2025, Ryanair launched its Prime membership scheme. With this, customers could spend £79 or €79 per year to receive benefits that include flight discounts, free reserved seating on up to 12 flights per year, and travel insurance.
Less than a year after launching, the airline has announced plans to end this membership program. The reason? Members used the benefits too much! The airline claims that 55,000 people have signed up for the program, and that has generated €4.4 million in revenue. Meanwhile the company claims it has provided more than €6 million in benefits. According to Dara Brady, Ryanair’s Chief Marketing Officer:
“Over the years, customers have asked for a Ryanair members scheme, so we trialled this ‘Prime’ scheme over the last 8 months. To date, we have signed up over 55,000 Prime members, generating over €4.4m in subscription fees. However, our Prime members have received over €6m in fare discounts, so this trial has cost more money than it generates. This level of memberships, or subscription revenue does not justify the time and effort it takes to launch monthly exclusive Prime seat sales for our 55,000 Prime members. We are grateful to our 55,000 Prime members who signed up to this Prime trial over the last 8-months, and they can rest assured that they will continue to enjoy exclusive flight and seat savings for the remainder of their 12-month membership.”
“With over 207m passengers this year, Ryanair will continue to focus on delivering the lowest fares in Europe to all our customers, and not this subset of 55,000 Prime members.”
Another interesting point is that Prime membership was supposed to be capped at 250,000 customers, but it never got to that level, with just over 20% of the cap being reached, before the program was shut down.
Is Ryanair being impressively transparent, or…?
Ryanair’s explanation for ending its Prime membership is almost suspiciously transparent, in a way that makes you wonder. Two things stand out:
- Suggesting that the program lost money because the amount in flight savings exceeded the amount in membership fees is an overly simplistic way to look at things, since the program may have also generated incremental revenue, with customers who may not have booked a flight on the airline
- Ryanair was advertising how the membership could save travelers money, and now the airline is ending the program because… it saved members money?
It just seems really odd to admit “hey, we launched a program to save people money, and it actually saved people money, so never mind.” I think perhaps the other factor here that isn’t emphasized enough is that the interest just wasn’t as big as the airline was hoping. With just 55,000 of the 250,000 possible memberships being purchased, it sounds like the airline may have misjudged the amount of interest there would be.
If the airline found there to be some overwhelming interest for such a program, I can see how the airline might continue to invest in the program, to make the math work. But with a lack of interest and bad economics, they figured it wasn’t worth the effort.
It’s also important to understand what a massive and focused airline Ryanair is. Like, the company hasn’t even gotten into the vacation package business (otherwise huge business for European carriers) because it feels it doesn’t need to, given its margins on transporting passengers, and seemingly never-ending ability to grow into new markets.
Bottom line
Ryanair is discontinuing its paid Prime membership program, claiming that it “only” generated €4.4 million in revenue, while giving out €6 million in benefits. It’s a bit unusual to launch a program under the guise of saving travelers money, only to shut it down when… travelers actually save money.
I suspect a large part of what’s going on here is that the interest for the program just wasn’t big enough, and with “only” 55,000 members, this just wasn’t even worth pursuing for the airline.
What do you make of Ryanair ending its membership program?
I joined this. It’s a waste of money. The seats you get offered for free are rubbish so I often pay extra for other ones. Their “prime”sales seem deceitful , with fares even more than normal…
Ryanair's average profit on a ticket is -4.2%. They rely on anciliary purchases to be profitable and certainly can not have anything like this.
Ryanair who? I would rather take FlixBus instead. Or the train.
Good luck. I heard the train from Glasgow to Malaga is great.
Jokes aside - if your expectations are set right, Ryanair is just fine. Not superb by any stretch if the imagination, but does the job. I flew them a number of times this year, mostly because they were the only airline having direct flights to my destination, and the experience has been smooth and pleasant.
I’m guessing it’s both reasons you note.
They ended up simplistically net negative (fees-benefits, without accounting for increased revenue) and had hoped they could sign up more people who’d have used it less than the 55,000 grinders that they got.
I'm grateful Ryanair shook things up in Europe 20 years.
But now they are just trying everything they can to screw their customers.
They are struggling against newcomers like Volotea and Vueling.
I'm pretty sure Ryanair will disappear in a few years
Are you just really bad at comedy, or really bad at researching basic stats?
Why would the largest (by passenger count) and most profitable airline in Europe, disappear?
And how exactly has Ryanair been "struggling" against a carrier like Vueling, with lower (relative) margins and decreased performance y.o.y than it (Ryanair) has delivered?
Ryanair should sell gym membership.
Whatever does the real or fake Eskimo know about the commercial aviation industry?
That login has no name, it lost its name completely lately by posting dubious information which was easily gashed.
"Excessively transparent"? Ryanair are well known to be excessively cost cutting, unbundling fares too the extreme and introducing unexpected (not "hidden", as they are always very explicit about those) charges to things that you and I might take for granted. (If they could charge you to breathe on their plane, they would.) That's literally their business model and they are proud of it, and it seems to work for them. I'd actually saying their explaining...
"Excessively transparent"? Ryanair are well known to be excessively cost cutting, unbundling fares too the extreme and introducing unexpected (not "hidden", as they are always very explicit about those) charges to things that you and I might take for granted. (If they could charge you to breathe on their plane, they would.) That's literally their business model and they are proud of it, and it seems to work for them. I'd actually saying their explaining the rationale for cancelling the Prime scheme - that customers are saving too much money and therefore Ryanair are losing money - is very on message.