Although there is a general belief that people travel on Ryanair merely because of the low prices it offers, a recent survey revealed that Ryanair is providing a product that consumers value in its totality.

Ryanair, which was founded in 1985 in Ireland and now has an annual European traffic of more than 35 million passengers, is becoming one of the world's largest international airlines with one of the world's youngest fleets (average two years) and an unblemished 21-year safety record.

This was the result of a quarterly online consumer survey conducted late last year for Davy, the leading institutional, corporate and private client broker operating in Ireland. The survey covered responses from about 20,000 passengers making use of European airports.

The majority of respondents ranged from 18- to 64-year-olds, who had travelled more than once with Ryanair. Respondents were evenly split between business, leisure and family related visits as regards to the purpose of the journey.

According to this survey, the check-in time is relatively fast, staff performance is considered at least satisfactory and the overall experience of the Ryanair flight rated good or excellent by over 81 per cent of those questioned.

The in-flight service, including responsiveness to passengers' requests, general professionalism and grooming, and the cabin environment, were considered as good by more than half of respondents. This goes a long way to explain the extremely high pattern of 83 per cent repeat bookings by Ryanair passengers.

The conclusions of this survey show that Ryanair not only guarantees the lowest air fares on the Internet but also combine this with other important elements where travelling is concerned. These include efficient service, friendly and professional staff members, punctuality and new aircraft.

According to customer service statistics provided by Ryanair and other airlines in 2005, Ryanair also scores the highest on on-time arrivals, baggage handling and consumer complaints, criteria used by the US Department of Transportation.

The Ryanair philosophy has been to take the approach of the low cost airline pioneers, South West Airlines in the USA, and to process re-engineer their operations so that Ryanair achieves a cost and price point below any competitor.

Ryanair then applied its model into a new definition of air travel - that of discretionary leisure spend where there is a high price elasticity of demand. Going for a long weekend to Malta will become a realistic alternative to theatre followed by dinner for two in most upper range restaurants in London - with Ryanair, they cost the same.

The extreme sensitivity of travel to price (the impact of the departure tax on Maltese citizens' travel patterns illustrates the point) has to be remembered when developing completely new point-to-point air routes. Ryanair with its extremely low prices, would develop the range of new routes to Malta with the frequencies that Malta needs.

The one thing Ryanair does not economise on is safety expenditure. But all other aspects have been process re-engineered, including those elements that are extremely costly to airlines if they get them wrong first time - such as baggage handling and scheduling to achieve on-time flights.

"Ryanair has grown from scratch to 35 million passengers, with Davy forecasting that Ryanair will capture an increasing share of the ever-growing intra-EU market in the near future," Peter Sherrard, Ryanair's director of Communications said.

"Our survey also showed that passengers fly with Ryanair more than once and all this indicates a positive consumer experience. Our customers are saying we are the Starbucks of the travel world, offering the best travel service with the lowest fares available."