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Comment by jib | Hacker News Reader

Is that because of pricing or because of company structure/setup though? Ryanair is currently predicting 510M profit on 81M trips in Europe for 2014.

Not saying they are a model company in any way (the main thing I disagree with is some of their employee treatment), but they are certainly proving that it is possible to operate a profitable airline with low prices and high quality.

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Calling RyanAir "high quality" must be some kind of joke.

only $6.30 profit per trip and that's the best example of a profitable airline, crazy

That is on about 3-4B revenue or so though, so its actually a pretty good profit margin.

That would be only $49 in revenue per trip, seems low.

I have no idea how airline accounting works, but if these numbers are correct, you'd have to assume quite a bit of money collected is not counted as revenue and is going to cover direct costs like taxes.

When you put it in those terms it seems almost insane. How can any company operate on such low margins? I mean, yes, the "Walmart model" is the answer, but it seems like they could go under very easily if hit by something unexpected.

> it seems like they could go under very easily if hit by something unexpected

They do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_bankruptcies_in_the_Uni...

There's an old joke about this: How do you make a million dollars in the airline business? Well, you start with a billion dollars...

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