Introduction of Ryanair Ryanair was founded in 1985 by three brothers, namely Declan Ryan, Catlan Ryan and Shane

Ryan (Box & Byus, 2005). They started with a share capital of 1 Euro and 25 staffs. Ryanair offers no frills travel services between Ireland and London (Barrett, 2004). The first route was launched in July 1985 from Waterford to London Gatwick using a 15-seater Bandeirante aircraft (S.D., 2011). Ryanair starts to make profits and expands its routes rapidly since 1985. Its average revenue is 4.325billion Euro in 2012. Today, Ryanair has emerged as the worlds favourite airline with more than 1500 flights a day connecting more than 168 destinations across 28 countries. How Ryanair implements knowledge management? Ryanair adopted the knowledge management of Southwest Airlines. It operates based on the no frill and low fare concepts (Barrett, 2004). Ryanair aims to provide low fares that will help to increase its passenger traffic while maintaining a low operating cost. It offers fare as low as 0.99 Euro for the Dublin to London route. The fare is excluding tax and service charges. In addition, Ryanairs strategy is to provide excellent customer service to its passengers (C., 2011). It tries to provide better punctuality, reduce flight delay, lesser lost baggages and lesser flight cancellations compared to the rest of the airlines in Europe (C., 2011). Ryanair also offers frequent point-to-point flights with a short turnaround time (Barrett, 2004). A short turnaround time means it can operate more times in a day. Ryanair has an average 1.83 round-trips for each route a day with an average of 1.2hours flight duration. Ryanair operates in secondary and regional airports as they are less congested and can provide a faster turnaround time (Papatheodorou & Lei, 2006). Besides, Ryanair tries to reduce its operating costs. It purchases a single fleet type of aircraft, controls its labour costs by improving the productivity of its employees, made agreements with third parties to reduce passenger and aircraft handling fees and focuses on airports that provide competitive cost terms in order to reduce its operating costs (Lawton, 2000). Furthermore, Ryanair took advantage of the internet. Ryanair changed its host reservation system which is the British Airways Booking System to a system called Flightspeed. This new system operates under a 10 year hosting agreement with the Accenture Open Skies. Open Skies has developed Skylights, which is a system that allows customers to access Ryanairs host reservation system and to make flight reservations through Ryanairs website.

Lastly, Ryanair started to train its own pilots, cabin crews and maintain its aircrafts according to the highest European airline industry standards (C., 2011). What Tony Fernasdes did at the time he took over AirAsia in 2002? After Tony Fernandes took over AirAsia in 2002, he invited Connor McCarthy, the former director of Ryanair to join AirAsia. Fernandes made a turnaround of AirAsia by introducing no frill and low fare concept (Stockport, 2012). No frills means eliminating the unnecessary in-flight meals, baggage allowance, narrow space between seats and reduced seat pitch. AirAsia became the first low-cost carrier to introduce ticketless system and a free seating policy in Asia. It operates using a single fleet type of aircraft (Ahmad, 2006). Fernandes also launched new routes from LCCT, Kuala Lumpur. Fernandes introduced the tagline Now Everyone Can Fly and offered promotional air fares as low as RM1 in 2002 (Ricart & Wang, 2005). References 1.Ahmad, R., (2006) 'AirAsia The Sky's the limit', Asian Journal of Management Cases , 3(1), pp. 25-50 . 2.Barrett, S. D., (2004) 'The sustainability of the Ryanair model', International Journal of Transport Management, 2(2), pp. 8998. 3.Box, T. M. & Byus, K., (2005) 'Ryanair:Successful low cost leadership', Journal of the international academy for case studies, 13(3), pp. 65-70. 4.C. M.(2011) Ryanair case study and strategic analysis: An analysis on the competitiveness and low-cost strategy of Europes leading low-cost carrier Ryanair. 1st ed. Munich: GRIN Verlag. 5.Lawton, T. C., (2000) 'Flying Lessons: Learning from Ryanair's Cost Reduction Culture', Journal of Air Transport World Wide, 5(1), pp. 89-105. 6.Papatheodorou, A. & Lei, Z., (2006) 'Leisure travel in Europe and airline business models: A study of regional airports in Great Britain', Journal of Air Transport Management, 12(1),p p. 47 52. 7.Ricart, J. E. & Wang, D., (2005) 'Now Everyone Can Fly AirAsia', Asian Journal of Management Cases , 2(2), pp. 231-255 .

8.S.D., B., (2011) Ryanair and the low cost revolution. In: J. F. O'Connell & G. Williams, eds. Air Transport in the 21st Century: Key Strategic Developments. Farnham: Key Strategic Developments, pp. 113. 9.Stockport, G. J., (2012) AirAsia - flying high, International Journal of Globalisation and Small Business, 4(3), pp. 324-333.