When Ryanair’s Loyalty Scheme Proved a Little Too Generous

For an airline that has built an empire on selling you precisely one thing and charging you for everything else, Ryanair has just made a very un-Ryanair decision: it’s shutting down its Prime frequent-flyer programme after only eight months.

Not because customers disliked it. Not because no one signed up. But because passengers were just too good at using the perks.

Prime launched in February with the kind of energy Ryanair usually reserves for telling you your bag is 2mm too big. £79 a year bought members flight discounts, free reserved seating on up to twelve trips, and even travel insurance – a pretty generous bundle for an airline used to turning its add-on revenue into an art form.

But once the numbers rolled in, the mood shifted. About 55,000 passengers signed up, generating €4.4 million (£3.5 million). And those passengers received more than €6 million in benefits.

That alone tells you everything: Prime wasn’t just unprofitable – it negatively rewarded exactly the behaviour Ryanair relies on customers not doing.

The Real Story Behind the Shutdown

Ryanair calls Prime a “trial”. In reality, it was a mild identity crisis.

The airline has always prided itself on a brutally efficient model: ultra-low fares on one side of the ledger and carefully engineered fees on the other. Baggage, seat selection, fast-track, early check-in – these charges aren’t quirks: they are the workhorses of Ryanair’s entire profitability. Prime essentially sent those workhorses back to the stables for a rest – not ideal when they’re supposed to be pulling the whole operation.

And it’s a model Ryanair has spent nearly two decades refining. With more than 207 million passengers a year, the airline built its dominance on fares that look almost implausibly cheap, then clawed back the margins through bags, seats and every other optional extra the industry had previously treated as part of the ticket. It was the first to charge for checked bags back in 2006, and it followed that with check-in fees in 2009 for anyone who hadn’t printed their boarding pass at home. The policy has aged like everything Ryanair touches: not gracefully, but very profitably.

And the attitude hasn’t mellowed. Earlier this year, airport staff bonuses were even increased for every oversized cabin bag they catch – a process that can leave passengers paying up to £75 when their luggage doesn’t quite squeeze into the sizer. This is Ryanair at its most consistent: the rules are the rules, and enforcement is performed with near-religious enthusiasm – which is precisely why the financial engine works.

Giving away free seats is a bit like pulling a brick out of a Jenga tower and hoping the whole stack doesn’t wobble. And wobble it did. Free seat allocation alone could save a member anywhere from £54 to £456 a year, depending how eagerly they used their twelve-flight entitlement. Multiply that across tens of thousands of subscribers and suddenly the “loyalty” scheme becomes a discount scheme that eats away at the core business.

Dara Brady, Ryanair’s chief marketing officer, put it more delicately: the programme “cost more than it generates” and didn’t justify the “time and effort” involved. Which essentially translates as: this is not what Ryanair is built for.

Why easyJet Makes Loyalty Work (And Ryanair Doesn’t)

What makes this story more interesting is that its nearest competitor, easyJet, has a similar concept – and theirs does work.

easyJet Plus comes in at over £215 a year, nearly triple the price of Prime. And because easyJet’s customer mix includes more business travellers and frequent city-break passengers, the perks sit naturally within how their customers travel. Free seating and fast-track are upgrades easyJet can monetise without eroding the margins that keep the lights on.

The loyalty ecosystem also has depth: bundles, Flexi fares, and credit-card tie-ins. It’s not just a subscription; it’s a funnel.

Ryanair tried to replicate that depth but built a trampoline instead – everyone bounced on it and Ryanair was left holding the bill.

What Other Airlines Got Right That Ryanair Didn’t

Wizz Air’s Discount Club is the closest parallel, and it succeeds precisely because it avoids giving away costly extras. Discounts are anchored to fares, not seats, bags or priority boarding. It is loyalty designed for a low-cost carrier, not layered on top of it.

Traditional carriers like BA live in another universe entirely. They can hand out upgrades and lounge access because long-haul cabins and corporate travel subsidise those costs. The economics simply don’t translate to €9.99 trips to Marseille.

Even Jet2’s approach works better because it revolves around holiday packages – larger-margin transactions where loyalty feels like a natural extension rather than a cost centre with wings.

Ryanair, by contrast, tried to squeeze a loyalty scheme into a business model that doesn’t leave much room for special treatment. Prime meant more questions at the desk, more fiddly rules, and more behind-the-scenes faff than the airline has ever been willing to tolerate.

In the end, Prime just didn’t fit the way Ryanair works.

So, What Happens Now?

Existing Prime members will continue to receive their benefits until the end of their 12-month memberships and will get access to low-fare offers until October 2026. No new members can join.

Ryanair has signalled it will shift its focus back to mass-market seat sales – the thing it knows how to run and can deliver at incredible scale. It is, essentially, returning to the model that made it Europe’s largest airline: cheap fares for all, fees for those who want anything more than the seat itself.

There’s something almost poetic about it. Ryanair tried to reward loyalty and ended up rewarding ingenuity instead – and its passengers proved a little too good at spotting a deal.

The Last Word

Prime’s quiet exit is a reminder that even the biggest airlines can misjudge what loyalty should look like. Ryanair built its business on simplicity and discipline, so a scheme full of exceptions and freebies was only ever going to test the limits of its model. The numbers simply made the decision for them.

easyJet, meanwhile, has shown there is room for loyalty in low-cost aviation – it just has to fit the way people actually travel. Its approach feels more at home in its business: the perks match the journeys its customers already take, and the structure gently nudges people into becoming regulars without making a song and dance about it.

Ryanair will bounce back, of course. It always does, usually with another flash sale and a reminder that its true loyalty programme has always been the same: fares low enough to make everyone look twice. Prime was a brief detour. The airline is simply returning to the model that made it Europe’s biggest carrier in the first place.