Ryanair has been the talk of the town within the online community this week and it’s not for the better. Online PR and reputation management have struggled to play an important role at Ryanair, but over the last week we have been fascinated by their ability to make a bad situation worse!

Dublin-based Web developer Jason Roe was booking plane tickets online when he discovered what he thought was a glitch that allowed him to book free Ryanair tickets. So he blogged and twittered about it. 

Among the responses on his site were 3 from Ryanair staff. One read: “You’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is! (sic) you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it!”

Another said: “Website is not perfect, Life is not perfect… (sic) If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things.”

Ryanair later confirmed that their staff did indeed make contact. “Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion,” said the airline’s spokesman Stephen McNamara. “It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy…”

The story has become so popular that Jason’s site now appears in 4th position on Google for the search term ‘Ryanair’. A great example of search, social media and online PR coming together, this will be a case study for years to come!