When Glassdoor conducted a poll, United Airlines Glenn Tilton turned out to be the worst chief executive officer. But had they not considered Michael O’Leary?
United employees complained that the company’s management treated them disrespectfully, were too bottom-line oriented and had run morale into the ground
But O’Leary, head of Ryanair, maintains short-haul airline passengers will endure nearly every imaginable indignity, as long as the tickets are cheap and the planes are on time.
He has discussed forgoing what he calls “discretionary toilet visitors” by having only one bathroom to a plane. And if passengers were stricken by an illness?
“We don’t serve enough food for everybody to get food poisoning,” he told a newspaper interviewer in between snorts.
He once dressed as the pope to advertise Ryanair’s new route from Dublin to Rome. He has declared that fat people should pay more for their seats, but that it would take too long to weigh them at the airport.
Ryanair flies more than 850 routes across Europe, often to obscure airports far away from big cities — “from nowhere to nowhere,” in the scoffing words of Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, who runs the competing airline EasyJet.
Glassdoor is a company that conducts online salary surveys.
By David Wilkening
