Always Getting Better as a corporate motto was always going to be a hostage to fortune. Coming from Ryanair, people are still smiling at the very thought of it, four years on from the launch of this self-help programme, which Michael O’Leary, its chief executive, admitted had the original working title of to stop “unnecessarily pissing people off”.
That its passengers are now referred to by the airline as “guests” is irritating, but nowhere near as much as the cancellations that grounded 315,000 guests last autumn when Ryanair forgot the basic principle of an airline: you need a pilot in the cockpit.
The getting better bit of the motto doesn’t bear scutiny, according to the later statistics. In the financial year, Ryanair’s much trumpeted on-time