Feature: Ryanair sets sights on becoming top ranked airline in British market

Low-cost airline Dublin-based Ryanair is celebrating its 30th founding anniversary with a target to become top ranked airline within 24 months in Britain.

It is also eyeing the lucrative business travel market, once the almost exclusive domain of higher cost airlines.

In 2014, Ryanair carried almost 90 million passengers, making it Europe's largest single airline. Although the Lufthansa Group carried 106 million passengers, that group is a combination of several airlines.

Took off in 1985 with a share capital of just one pound (sterling) and one route between Waterford, Ireland, to London's Gatwick Airport, Ryanair is now flying high.

The founding Ryan family employed just a few dozen people, and in its debut year just 5,000 passengers were carried.

Today Ryanair has 1,600 daily flights serving 190 routes in Europe and North Africa. It has a fleet of 300 aircraft with a further 380 on order, as it eyes flights further afield to destinations in Russia, Isreal and the Gulf States. It currently employs 9,500 aviation professionals at its 72 base airports.

Since its launch, the airline has carried more than 750 million passengers with an unblemished safety record. Ryanair is increasingly targeting business travel as a growth area, which has become increasingly attractive to companies eager to seek cheaper ways of moving around executives in today's climate of austerity.

It has launched a customer improvement campaign with an "Always getting better" program, to shrug off the image of no-frills airlines as "cheap and not always cheerful".

In the forefront of Ryanair's success is its one-time controversial CEO Michael O'Leary, once described as a "corporate loudmouth".

Mentored by the airline's co-founder, the late Tony Ryan, O'Leary has been in the driving seat for 20 years and is contracted to stay until 2019.

In the past year or so O'Leary has become more "user friendly" towards passengers, taking a softer approach he admitted in one interview "he should have done a long time ago".

This week the airline's chief marketing officer Kenny Jacobs and chief technical officer John Hurley were in Manchester as part of the 30th anniversary celebrations.

Both said high on Ryanair's agenda was its continuing attempt to soften its reputation for adopting an uncompromising approach towards customers, describing business travel as one of the airline's fastest growing markets.

Jacobs said Ryanair went from the number three ranked airline in Britain to number two in 2014 and is targeting top slot within the next 24 months.

He said: "What has changed is that Ryanair has always been the cheapest, but the service was a little rough around the edges."

To mark the start of its 30th year, Ryanair has released 100,000 seats on routes across its European network, from just 19.99 euros (about about 23.6 U.S. dollars), for travel in January, February and March. Endit