What I learnt about drunk passengers and cabin crew pay on a Ryanair recruitment day
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“I’m on a mission, man. Some people want to go to the Olympics, some people want to go to Mars. This is my dream. My future is through those doors. I feel like Michael Phelps before he dives in.”
Jariel Thomas is all fired up. This could be his big break. The doors he’s referring to lead to a conference room at the Stevenage Holiday Inn, where I would guess not many dreams have been made. Behind them sits Cesare De Vecchi, a turtleneck-wearing Italian who’s leading a Ryanair recruitment day at the hotel, conducting interviews with prospective flight attendants; clearing high-flyers for take-off and keeping others grounded.
Jariel is fresh off the plane himself. A couple of weeks ago he flew to England from Trinidad, still in shock after his boss died suddenly of a heart attack. “The last thing he said to me was ‘live your life, don’t let life live you’,” he says. At the memory he shakes his head, upon which a rasta turban conceals his dreads.
His boss’s eerily auspicious words became a mantra for Jariel. He quit his job as a mechanic, married his girlfriend, left Trinidad and moved to Luton with the singular aim of becoming a flight attendant, ignoring all the naysayers back home who he said told him it was “a job for women and gay men”.
“This is all I’m focused on now,” he says. “If I don’t get through, I’ll try again. I don’t believe in luck; I believe in working towards your dreams.”
His go-getter attitude is infectious. I make a mental note to try harder, to channel my inner Jariel, to curb the cynicism, step things up a gear.
Moments earlier, I’d sat with Jariel and other hopeful jetsetters inside the conference room, listening to a presentation and a whirring overhead projector, working out whether I could cut it as a flight attendant for Ryanair.
Starting salaries and unlimited tickets
“You need to be punctual,” Cesare said. “This is important.” Ah. Oh, well. He then played some slow-mo corporate vid of smiley, white-teethed cabin crew gliding sensually through a terminal, as if in a L’Oréal advert. I zoned out and looked around the room at the 20 or so hopefuls — a fairly even mix of men and women — all flirting with new careers as flight attendants for Europe’s biggest budget airline.
A couple of fellas had turned up in blue suits almost identical in tone to the Ryanair uniform (which staff don’t have to pay for, by the way; that’s a myth). Was it a coincidence, or a deliberate attempt to ingratiate themselves with Cesare? Did Bruna and Fabio, the flight attendants drafted in to talk about their jobs, see the blue-suited men and unconsciously consider them part of the Ryanair family? I couldn’t work out whether it was slick subliminal messaging, or akin to a granny smith placed obsequiously on a teacher’s desk. I was leaning towards the latter.
Speaking of teachers, I heard something that took me back to my school days. “The moment you leave the house in uniform you represent the company,” said Cesare. My old headmaster said something similar, and henceforth I was always conscious to project the right image while smoking Lambert & Butler outside the chippy after school.
Eventually, we got to the juicy stuff: remuneration. The starting salary was – drum roll – £15,750. Cue tumbleweed. But that figure, said Cesare, excludes flight payments (crew are paid a supplement for each hour they’re in the air) and commission. On average, he reckoned, it worked out at about £23,000. Still not much excitement.
News of the unlimited stand-by tickets for staff got the crowd twitching, though. Go anywhere in Europe and pay only taxes – now we’re talking. This is why they were here. They wanted to see the world, or Europe at least, and why not?
Staff socials – and cleaning up sick
The Ryanair socials were legendary, too, added Cesare, knowingly. Out of uniform, cabin crew like to party and “get to know each other”, he said. I bet. And the five-days-on, three-days-off roster left ample time to recover from hangovers, he purred (though mine now last three days). I was starting to buy into it, but that’s Ryanair for you – always selling. A good chunk of the job, we were informed, was sales.
“Sometimes I pay my rent with commission,” said Fabio. Bruna nodded in agreement. “We are selling all the time,” added Cesare, previously a flight attendant for 16 years.
And therein lies an uneasy contradiction within the role: Ryanair crew earning commission on booze while trying to prevent in-flight inebriation. You basically want passengers gently sozzled but not yakking-behind-a-wheelie-bin-at-3am drunk. Tough balance to strike.
Drunkenness is, of course, synonymous with low-cost carriers, which routinely fly stag-and-hen-dos to eastern European backwaters for debauched weekends. In fact, there was an incident recently. A passenger covertly downed half a bottle of duty-free Scotch on a flight and wanted to fight Fabio, a former nightclub doorman. “We had to divert to [the Spanish city] Vigo,” he said. The lout was eventually dragged off the plane by Spanish police, no punches having been thrown.
“What about the sick?” someone asked. Do they have to clean it up? “We don’t touch the vomit,” said glamorous Bruna, reassuringly. That was a job for the cleaning team, she added. The relief was palpable.
‘A challenging job’
I looked on Glassdoor (the site where staff can anonymously review employers) before the recruitment day. Reviews suggested that working for Ryanair is no picnic, although staff do need to pack one because the airline doesn’t provide food. “They legally work you to the bone,” griped one reviewer. “Fun job, bad pay,” said another. Others were more complimentary and overall the airline had an average score of 3.2 out of 5. By comparison, British Airways gets 3.5, while easyJet hits the giddy heights of 4.2.
“It’s a challenging job,” admitted Cesare. The sales, the sometimes anti-social hours, the delays (which staff aren’t paid extra for), not to mention the “intense” six-week training course, which applicants must pass. Among other things, it requires participants to swim 25 metres while dragging someone behind them, which is odd given the likelihood of a successful water landing. Personally, I’d rather they were taught how to deliver the last rites.
“I’m a bit worried about the swimming test,” one female applicant, who asked to remain anonymous, told me after the presentation. Apart from that, she was pumped and ready to leave her job in childcare. “I need a change. This sounds good, they are very welcoming.”
I hang around the coffee machine in the lobby, topping up my mug while applicants are called up for interviews. Jariel goes in and returns the allotted seven minutes later, smiling. He thinks it went well. If not, “I’ll be back,” he says.
The coffee machine dispenses another cappuccino. Cesare bursts through the doors as it beeps. “Sorry, guys, coffee is not included,” he says. “It’s not free.” Of course. We should have known. This is Ryanair.
