Airline offers free flights as Christmas gift

[December 22nd 2008]

Low fares airline Ryanair is offering 500,000 free seats as an early Christmas present.

The low cost airline’s Christmas Seat Give Away runs from today until 12pm on Christmas Eve. The half a million free seats are for one way travel including taxes and charges in January and February.

Ryanair says the free seats are a thank you to the 58 million passengers who have made it “Europe’s favourite airline”. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has described himself as Scrooge and says that Ryanair staff will be working all the way up to Christmas Day in order to deliver the 500,000 free seats to passengers.

“Some people may call me Scrooge while some people may compare me to Father Christmas but they can call me what they like - Ryanair will be working on Christmas Eve to deliver passengers 500,000 free one-way seats, which include all taxes and charges,” says O’Leary.

“Passengers have made 2008 a fantastic year for Ryanair with traffic growing every month in 2008 as passengers abandoned high fares, fuel surcharging, airlines throughout Europe and opted for Ryanair’s guaranteed lowest airfares and no fuel surcharge,” O’Leary adds.

“We hope those who are yet to even begin their Christmas shopping can take advantage of these 500,000 free seats. However, these fares are bound to go fast as those who, like me, have been a little preoccupied of late snap up free flights for family and friends this Christmas,” concludes O’Leary.

Ryanair carried 4.32 million passengers in November, an increase of 11% on the same month last year, as the airline continues to expand. Load factors – the measure of the occupancy level of flights – were up marginally, by 1% to 79% this November.

Last month Ryanair announced that it would be introducing new flights from Gatwick airport. “Thanks to the collapse of a number of high fares airlines Ryanair is able to bring its lowest airfare and no fuel surcharge to even more Gatwick passengers,” said Ryanair’s Stephen McNamara. The new Gatwick flights are to Alicante, Barcelona Girona and Dusseldorf Weeze.

Written by: Nick Purdom

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