Have you ever flown around Europe on Ryanair for 5 euros? It is a pretty remarkable airline that is run by Michael O’Leary.
While we won’t get into the RASMs and CASMs of Ryanair (today anyway), we wanted to frame the story with a few numbers of their performance over the last decade.
The man behind the story is Michael O’Leary. He is the CEO of Ryanair and his been there since 1988 (CEO since 1994). He is rumored to have gone over in the late 80s to see how low cost upstart Southwest Airlines operated, which was founded by one of our most favorite CEOs ever - the late Herb Kelleher. You can see our article on why Berkshire bought the airlines for more - http://www.canadianvalueinvestors.com/home/2018/6/4/investing-in-north-american-airlines-why-did-berkshire-hathaway-buy-airlines-anyway
One of us has affectionately said that Michael O’Leary Herb Kelleher’s Irish cousin that is quite a bit more brash but probably drinks about the same. And so, this brings us to an interview with Michael from a 2013 Low Cost Airline conference. Frankly, he’s very entertaining, beginning his interview by openly questioning why some airlines attending the conference are even there. We thought our readers would enjoy (we sure did).