I guess Ryanair would be more like the poor man's Hooters Air[1]... but I think may be giving Hooters Air too much credit. I've never flown on either of these airlines but I'm well aware of their reputations. Ryanair[2] is a super-low-fare European airline that has been known to offer flights all over the continent for as little as 1€. Ryanair now says they're looking in to offering transatlantic economy tickets for something like 10€. This comes from a recent press conference somewhere in Germany, the video can be found on the right. Herein lies the Hooters Air analogy. In the video, Ryanair's CEO Michael O'Leary (the poor man's Richard Branson[3]) says that he should be able to offer these crazy low fairs because business travelers will have to pay the difference because, "there will always be 10 or 15% of the market who will be willing to pay for the business class frills." He elaborates saying that it'll be very cheap in economy while in business class it'll be "beds and blowjobs." How's that for a sales pitch...
To be fair, Hooters Air didn't offer sexual favors to their patrons, which is probably why they went out of business. One thing these two airlines really do have in common though are the promotional calendars. Everyone is familiar with the Hooters calendar[4] featuring the down home trollops from some of the south's finest eateries. Well, Ryanair put out a similar calendar[5]. The best part of the whole "Girls of Ryanair" concept is that, what if the entire airline was run by ditzy co-eds? What if you're preflight mechanical check was performed by a girl in a bikini... if that were really the case they'd charge more than 10€ per flight. But seriously, they'd probably be out of business because sensible people would probably think twice about booking their ticket. These "Girls of..." never made a whole lot of sense to me in this regard. It's not like those girls are really piloting the planes or doing any of the other crap they are posing for. Anyway, I digress.
I think it'd be an awesome experiment for Ryanair to try and expand their ultra low fare business model to the U.S. It'll be interesting to see what the rate disparity will end up being between economy class and BJ class in order to make this sort of thing work.
And for the record, while there is no literal translation of blowjob in German the concept does exists linguistically. Jemanden einen blasen means the same thing, not that a translation was really needed, hence the laughter...