Why Ryanair’s new paperless policy could create chaos at airports next summer

The Irish airline’s chief executive has revealed his vision for a digital future, but the plans are strikingly low on detail

Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, has revealed plans to eliminate printed boarding passes by May 2025, a move that would make it the first airline in the world to go entirely paperless.
Speaking at a press conference in Dublin last week, Michael O’Leary said: “We are working towards May 1 that everything will be done on the app, nothing will be done on paper anymore.”
Around 60 per cent of Ryanair passengers use the app. O’Leary says he expects this to rise to 80 per cent before the end of the year, before hitting 100 per cent next spring. As well as eliminating printed boarding passes, physical check-in desks could be on the way out too.
O’Leary said he was originally reluctant to make the move. “I’m one of the last remaining people still showing up with my piece of paper,” he said, adding: “But it works so well. [The app] tells you your gate and if there is a delay.” 
At present, passengers are charged £55 if they forget to check in online before getting to the airport. O’Leary says that by scrapping check-in desks and physical boarding passes, nobody will ever have to pay for their ticket to be printed at the airport again.
“The airport check-in fee will be gone. So I think it will be a smoother, easier journey for everybody,” he said.
However, things are currently light on detail. A spokesman for Ryanair confirmed that plans were indeed underway but that there was no further information at this stage. Here are the main questions that need to be answered.
As hard as it might be to believe, around one in 10 British adults (8 per cent of the population) don’t have a smartphone, according to the comparison site Uswitch. It is unclear what the options will be for travellers who do not have a smartphone or access to a device that they can take to the airport.
In the press briefing, it was made clear that passengers will not miss their flights due to technical issues with their mobile devices, as booking information will be available at the gate. However, it remains unclear how a passenger without a ticket would make it through the first boarding pass checks before security, particularly if there isn’t a check-in desk to receive a printed boarding pass.
O’Leary said that there are already protocols in place if a passenger’s phone dies while at the airport: “If your battery dies, we have your seat and your passport and we can do that at the boarding gates at the moment,” he said. 
However, as above, it is unclear what a passenger is supposed to do if they do not have access to their digital ticket at the first stage of boarding-pass checks before security.
Some international airports still do not accept digital boarding passes. On the Ryanair website it says: “If you depart from a Moroccan airport, a digital boarding pass will not be accepted. You must carry a physical printout of your boarding pass, and you’ll need to present this boarding pass at the Moroccan airport check-in facility.”
A number of other destinations don’t accept mobile boarding passes, including all of Turkey (except for Dalaman) and Tirana in Albania: “Customers travelling from these airports must check in online and print out a paper boarding pass for their flight(s),” Ryanair says on its website.
In order to go 100 per cent digital, there would need to be a systems overhaul at these airports, some of which are not currently equipped for digital ticket checks and still rely on manual printed ticket inspections.
No airline has banned paper boarding passes completely, but other low-cost carriers such as Wizz Air encourage mobile boarding passes, and charge a fee if you fail to check in online and need to print your ticket at the airport desk. 
A number of airports are now using facial-recognition systems and self-service kiosks for bag drop, and some encourage the use of digital boarding passes to speed things up. Using biometrics, Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi plans to eventually allow passengers to travel through the airport without showing a single document.
This is not the first time Ryanair’s chief executive has announced a bold new plan without having the hard details to back it up.
In the past O’Leary has suggested charging passengers to use the onboard toilets, mooted scrapping armrests to reduce the weight of aircraft, and even floated the idea of a standing-only part of the plane.
Recently he suggested introducing a limit of two alcoholic drinks at airports to crack down on disruptive passengers: “We need to bring it back a little bit on the amount of drinking,” he said. “I personally am fond of a drink, but I don’t know why bars in airports are open at 7am, [when] normal pubs can’t open until 11am or 12pm.”
This year, O’Leary said Ryanair ticket prices could go up by more than 30 per cent in the next four to five years, after disappointing Q1 and Q2 results and a 46 per cent drop in profits this summer.
No doubt Ryanair will continue to encourage customers to use its mobile app. Indeed, a cynic might suggest raising awareness about the airline’s app was the real purpose of O’Leary’s bold statements. But it would be quite an endeavour to achieve complete digitisation of its ticketing system in just over half a year.