Ryanair Hints at Charging for Toilets

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary is at it again, this time suggesting to the BBC that his no-frills airline might start charging passengers a pound to use lavatories on flights.

As you'd expect, the British press is having a field day with this one, with a lot of them playing off the phrase "spend a penny," which is an Irish euphemism for, erm, going No. 1.

It's not clear whether he was serious. O'Leary's fond of making outrageous statements designed to drum up publicity and reinforce the airline's image as a bargain-basement transport option, a strategy that's worked in the past. And later on Friday, Ryanair issued a statement saying "Michael makes a lot of this stuff up as he goes along and while this has been discussed internally there are no immediate plans to introduce it."

Some mortified Ryanair pilots are taking the statement at face value, but I tend to think it's a publicity stunt, for the very excellent reason, as pointed out by a spokeswoman for an airline travelers' advocacy group, that charging for using the toilet would tend to discourage sales of drinks on flights, which is high-margin source of ancillary revenue for the airline.

It also raises operational issues -- O'Leary's proposing coin-operated doors that would be opened by inserting 1 pound coins, but on Ryanair flights in Europe, most passengers could be expected to be carrying Euro coins, not pounds, so who would make change?