Is Ryanair’s Jeans flying by the seat of his pants?

Is Ryanair’s Jeans flying by the seat of his pants?

Ryanair sales and marketing director Tim Jeans is a braver man than most.

To make a laughing stock of agents just days before standing in front of 700 of them as a guest speaker at a conference takes a lot of courage.

Of course, we all know that agents and Ryanair are often at each other’s throats. It’s not the first time that Jeans or Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary have hit out at retailers and it’s unlikely to be the last.

Plenty of agents have written to Travel Weekly complaining it’s unfair of Ryanair to dictate how they run their businesses by stopping them charging booking fees.

But has Jeans sunk to a new low by describing agents as a bunch of lemmings who should jump off a cliff?(See Letters, page 10-11) Is this the right way to have a constructive dialogue? Read Travel Weekly next week to see if Advantage members took his comments in good spirit or whether Tim was sent to Coventry in Killarney.