Ryanair is ending its annual paid membership program, after finding that members actually took advantage of the savings being offered. That’s quite an explanation…
Ryanair claims it’s losing money on Prime memberships
In early 2025, Ryanair launched its Prime membership scheme. With this, customers could spend £79 or €79 per year to receive benefits that include flight discounts, free reserved seating on up to 12 flights per year, and travel insurance.
Less than a year after launching, the airline has announced plans to end this membership program. The reason? Members used the benefits too much! The airline claims that 55,000 people have signed up for the program, and that has generated €4.4 million in revenue. Meanwhile the company claims it has provided more than €6 million in benefits. According to Dara Brady, Ryanair’s Chief Marketing Officer:
“Over the years, customers have asked for a Ryanair members scheme, so we trialled this ‘Prime’ scheme over the last 8 months. To date, we have signed up over 55,000 Prime members, generating over €4.4m in subscription fees. However, our Prime members have received over €6m in fare discounts, so this trial has cost more money than it generates. This level of memberships, or subscription revenue does not justify the time and effort it takes to launch monthly exclusive Prime seat sales for our 55,000 Prime members. We are grateful to our 55,000 Prime members who signed up to this Prime trial over the last 8-months, and they can rest assured that they will continue to enjoy exclusive flight and seat savings for the remainder of their 12-month membership.”
“With over 207m passengers this year, Ryanair will continue to focus on delivering the lowest fares in Europe to all our customers, and not this subset of 55,000 Prime members.”
Another interesting point is that Prime membership was supposed to be capped at 250,000 customers, but it never got to that level, with just over 20% of the cap being reached, before the program was shut down.
Is Ryanair being impressively transparent, or…?
Ryanair’s explanation for ending its Prime membership is almost suspiciously transparent, in a way that makes you wonder. Two things stand out:
- Suggesting that the program lost money because the amount in flight savings exceeded the amount in membership fees is an overly simplistic way to look at things, since the program may have also generated incremental revenue, with customers who may not have booked a flight on the airline
- Ryanair was advertising how the membership could save travelers money, and now the airline is ending the program because… it saved members money?
It just seems really odd to admit “hey, we launched a program to save people money, and it actually saved people money, so never mind.” I think perhaps the other factor here that isn’t emphasized enough is that the interest just wasn’t as big as the airline was hoping. With just 55,000 of the 250,000 possible memberships being purchased, it sounds like the airline may have misjudged the amount of interest there would be.
If the airline found there to be some overwhelming interest for such a program, I can see how the airline might continue to invest in the program, to make the math work. But with a lack of interest and bad economics, they figured it wasn’t worth the effort.
It’s also important to understand what a massive and focused airline Ryanair is. Like, the company hasn’t even gotten into the vacation package business (otherwise huge business for European carriers) because it feels it doesn’t need to, given its margins on transporting passengers, and seemingly never-ending ability to grow into new markets.
Bottom line
Ryanair is discontinuing its paid Prime membership program, claiming that it “only” generated €4.4 million in revenue, while giving out €6 million in benefits. It’s a bit unusual to launch a program under the guise of saving travelers money, only to shut it down when… travelers actually save money.
I suspect a large part of what’s going on here is that the interest for the program just wasn’t big enough, and with “only” 55,000 members, this just wasn’t even worth pursuing for the airline.
What do you make of Ryanair ending its membership program?
