Ryanair, CTO, John Hurley at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Airlines in Transition 2025

Transcript

John Hurley:We look at the customer journey, we break it down into different segments. For example, we're working very hard at the moment to improve the baggage drop experience at many airports. We've rolled a new mobile app called Day of Travel, which gives you your gate number, travel time, talk time, give you warnings about boarding is open, boarding is closing. If a gate changes, we've rolled out technology, we call it Raven internally, it's linked to Game of Thrones, send a raven. We send ravens in technology as well too. And it's a message if your flight's been delayed. If it's delayed by more than 25 minutes, we will let you know that it's coming and where it is. And we believe very strongly in technology should be democratization. Everybody gets essentially what happens, our pilots, our cabin crew, our gate agents, and our passengers get the exact same information at the same time. If anything goes wrong, we're telling you what's happening there and then. Who's in charge of the technology? We're using technology on board. You can now order a ham and cheese panini and a can of Coke from your seat. You don't have to wait anymore for the trolley to come down. That's on your mobile phone. We're looking at using mandatory mobile phone boarding from next November. We believe that'll bring us to the next level of customer engagement where we can always talk to customers and tell them what's happening, any delays, any issues, where your baggage may be, or if the gate has changed. So we're always looking at that. The next level then beyond that is if there's disruption, it does happen, you can't deny it, how technology can improve upon that. Can we get you on another flight immediately? Can we organize your hotel? Can we organize your transfer? And bearing down. So get rid of this idea of passengers joining queues, let themselves serve themselves on a mobile phone. So huge ambition on how we can improve the customer journey from beginning right to the very end. In the last 12 months, we've rolled out a customer portal. That means all customers can now self-serve any issue they have. You want an extra bag, you want to reserve a seat, you want to apply for EU 261, you can do it all online. There's no need to ring a customer service agent unless your problem is very unique and very specific. And even then, we're working very hard to remove all those edge cases. A very simple operation, very simple airline, and it should be very straightforward to allow people to self-serve. So technology actually covers every single aspect of the end user journey. Obviously, booking is key. It's primarily what we've been doing for the last, last 10, 11 years in labs. We have the world's busiest airline website, so it's busy, it's fully hosted, does what it needs to do. And we're selling roughly— well, we're selling 210 million flights this year. So that's a lot of traffic on the website. So I think we were in a good place. And we're using machine learning to help our pricing, through our dynamic pricing, our fares, to help us with how we sell our bags, how we sell priority boarding, our reserved seats. So technology is actually impacting virtually every single part of the customer journey, from what they pay to getting off on the other side. And then we're also, of course, naturally using technology for our crew. I would say it's Europe's favorite airline. Why do I say that? With 210 million passengers this year, nobody flies more than they do with us. So I think that's kind of there. Number one, on-time performance. We don't lose your bag. We do all the things you expect an airline to do. We do it very, very well. And if it wasn't for air traffic control, our performance this summer would be amazing. We're phenomenal value and we'll get you there on time. I think people are pleasantly surprised when they fly Ryanair for the first time. The fact technology is there, technology does work. And a lot of things that we do, customers think are weird, but are actually for customers' advantage and their benefit and actually makes their life easier. And the next time they travel with us, It is so much better, like knowing where your gate is, knowing the departure, knowing all those bits and pieces, getting continuous updates. It makes your whole travel experience an awful lot easier. And even having your boarding pass on your phone in your pocket, it's phenomenal. If your seat has got to change, we can do it dynamically. We can contact you with any issues that you may have. I think biometrics, if we figure that out, would be phenomenal. We can go through airports with less barriers, easier to board, less passport checks, less immigration issues. I think that would be very exciting, but that would require globally aviation to get involved with security and every government to line up correctly. What's exciting me most in Ryanair at the moment is actually order-to-seat. It's a really cool technology we built internally in labs. We use the Bluetooth technology on your mobile phone to talk to the cabin crew to put an order in. No info entertainment, no Wi-Fi, none of those complicated, expensive solutions. It's cheap, it's simple, and it works. And it's testament to Ryanair who can roll out a brand new product, a brand new idea. It'll help our ancillary revenue at no cost from a technology perspective. So anytime we can find a way to improve the customer experience and not cost us anything in hardware, you'll always get Ryanair's attention. Thank you.

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