I agree with the above comments Aer Lingus are a pleasure to fly with.

Would be interested to know how many of these were one way trips, particularly the long haul.

Great company.
They don’t treat their customers like a herd of cattle.
Very satisfactory customer service all round.
Keep it up.

I agree with Stray Mutt’s sentiment. The dreadful Irish summer has to be great news, everyone wants/needs a break from it. Message to Aer Lingus management/hierarchy – never sell out to Ryanair.

I’ll always fly AerLingus. Little perks like their Gold Circle, which gets you fast tracked through the Airport and onto the plane first is perfect when travelling a lot.

Unfortunately because of the still pervasive rip off attitude in many our tourist spots only 50% of visitors to ireland ever return, this contrasts starkly with Scotland, who have similarly terrible weather but visitors there return on average at least twice. Plus of course they have a huge focus on Culture and actually invest in it. This year being the year of Creative Scotland for example.

Aer Lingus are a pleasure to fly with and I do so very regularly, but when it comes to flying to London Heathrow they haven’t a patch on British Airways exceptional service. As for Ryanair: never in a million years.

When it’s comes to booking flights, I’ll fly either Aer Lingus or Ryan air. It comes down to price. I have never had a bad experience with either. Plus they’re both Irish!

OK, here is a Ryanair hater. I am admittedly a nervous flier (though I fly a lot) and the whole experience is very unpleasant to me for the following reasons:

-Comfort on the plane. Leg room is minimal. I’m no giant, but my legs do not fit and I have to keep them slightly spread or turned to either side. On an Aer Lingus A320 or A321 I have more than an inch to spare.

-Seat not assigned. This causes big queues when boarding because everyone wants to be on first to make sure they have room for their bags and get a seat they like. This typically means you stand and queue much earlier with them. In less disciplined countries than Ireland (e.g. Italy, where I’m from), that also means keeping your eyes on everyone else because you’ll often have several other people trying to jump the queue.

-Seat not assigned 2: chaos getting to the plane and in the plane. In some airports the plane is far away on the tarmac, and people run for it. Once on the plane, people rush for seats and, especially in some countries, it came become unpleasant. On Aer Lingus you go to your seat and that’s all. Essentially on Ryanair I face a tense situation from 1h before takeoff, which I don’t get with other airlines.

-Continuous advertising throughout the flight. You get a bit of that everywhere, but on Ryanair it’s endless.

-Very substantial difference between price initially advertised and what you actually pay. Handling fees, fee for paying with credit card, etc. I tend to book my flights at least one month in advance and that means that Ryanair is rarely cheaper (or if so, barely), once all fees are added. Notice that with Ryanair the credit card fee is not included at first because they keep it free for some obscure credit card (they pick the least used one), so it isn’t technically an “unavoidable fee” and they can go around European rules.

-Perception of less safety. Safety isn’t about planes crashing because fortunately they nearly never crash. Ryanair being a relatively young airline, it isn’t surprising they haven’t had a crash with fatalities so far. However, they had at least one very serious cabin decompression while cruising, one plane written off in Rome after a very rough landing (part of landing gear collapsed), a number of tail strikes, with emergency landings ensuing, and now we have evidence that they essentially force their pilots to carry less fuel than they are comfortable with. Issuing a mayday is very serious (and very rare), and we now know it has happened in at least 3 cases recently. If a plane ends up landing with half a tonne of fuel, that means that, if for whatever reason the landing is unsafe and the pilot would feel like aborting, he/she still has to land because they have no fuel to give it a second try.

-Inconvenient airports, in many cases. Think Paris, where they fly to Beauvais which is ages away, while CDG is on a convenient RER connection to the centre. And so there are many other cases.

[-This isn't really an inconvenience, but it's one of their little advertising tricks I can't stand. Ryanair planes have the same arrival time as the departure time for the same plane on the next leg. That is: say a plane is flying into Dublin from X and then proceding to next destination Y. Say the departure time to Y is 15:40. Then the arrival time from X will be advertised as 15:40, while it is, obviously, really expected to be 15:00 or so because it takes about 40 minutes to turn the plane around. This way Ryanair gives itself the best chance of being "on time". They're on time because, effectively, they inflate their flight time as much as they can..]

I only fly Ryanair in one case: when it saves me flights. If I can get there in one hop and others require stopovers, I generally, begrudgingly, go with them. But it’s an unpleasant experience to me.

My uncle who lives in glasgow came home for a weeks holiday last month. He flew from glasgow to cork on a tue and returned the following wed. He flew with aerlingus. Both flights were delayed by over 2 hours. I have flown with ryanair many times and never had any problems.

ryan air are a pleasure to fly with i never had a problem with them. its all about the price at the end of the day.

I flew with Aer Lingus on an international flight because of their track record and the couple of complaints I had:
Not enough leg room on international routes.
I paid extra for an exit seat but it got lost in Cyberspace.
If you book a flight online. Follow up with a phone call to make sure everything is Kosher