Stay with me here. Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s fearless leader and king of publicity, has announced his plans for a transatlantic airline. And yes, it will apparently include blowjobs.

His plan? A bunch of economy class seats that will sell for 10 euros or something really cheap like that as well as a business class that’ll run you 4,000 to 5,000 euros. Why would you pay that much? “Beds and blowjobs.” Now THAT’s a value proposition. Don’t believe me? Watch for yourself (sorry, but the video is blowjob free):

I’m actually surprised that he gets that you need to have a premium cabin to make this work, but it’s his spin on the product that makes this blogworthy. Will it happen? Probably not, but he’ll get all kinds of people to write about it. Heck who knows if he’ll ever get this thing off the ground at all, but who cares? Just watching his translator squirm is worth the post.

Looks like Ryanair’s upgrade went well, and the site even came back up a day early. When I read through the page describing the benefits of the upgrade, one thing stood out.

You can now check-in for your flight online up to 5 days in advance of travel. If both your flights happen to be within 5 days, you can check in for both of them. Interesting.

It used to be that if you had checked in for a flight with most airlines, you were somewhere in the airport. Gate agents could be pretty sure that if they showed a certain number of people checked-in, they could expect them to show up, unless they were on a delayed connecting flight. Even then, it was easy for the agents to predict how things would go. That was really helpful on oversold flights.

But then people started having the ability to check in from home. All of a sudden, people could show up as checked-in, but they could have been stuck in traffic or had a last minute change of plans so there was a better chance they wouldn’t show up. It made it harder to predict how full an aircraft would be.

Now, you can check yourself in 5 days prior to your flight. Imagine all the things could happen in that time? Yet now, people will check in 5 days in advance on Ryanair, because it’s still first come, first serve seating. So, even if you think your plans might change, you’re not going to take a chance that you get stuck with a late boarding number. So they can expect even less certainty.

This makes me think. What’s the point of having you check in at all?

If you need to book a ticket, change your ticket, or view your reservation on Ryanair in the next few days, you better hurry up. Starting tonight (Friday, Feb 22) at 10pm GMT (11pm on the Continent), Ryanair will completely shut down its booking engine while it upgrades it. The site won’t come back up until Monday, Feb 25 at 11p GMT. During that time, you won’t be able to:

• Make a booking online
• Make any changes to an existing booking online
• Review your flight itinerary online
• Check-in online for any flight (fees will be waived to check-in at the airport)
• Get any information from Ryanair – they’re shutting down their call centers the whole time

I have to say, I can’t remember ever seeing a system upgrade go like this before. Knowing Ryanair, this was probably the cheapest way to do the upgrade, so they signed on to just shut everything down. Hopefully when it comes back up, they’ll have better luck than other airlines who have recently tried to upgrade. Keep your fingers crossed, and if you’re traveling this weekend, get there earlier than normal to deal with the long lines that are likely to occur.

I downloaded Bing on the first day it came out hoping to see some of the great deals they were promising. I mean, if they already offer GBP .01 deals, how could it get any better?

Since I don’t live in Europe, I picked London/Stansted as my city of choice since I figured that would have plenty of deals rolling through. So far, I haven’t seen one. Not a single alert has come through.

Now to be fair, I don’t log on until about 730a or 8a in the morning so that’s 330p or 4p London time. If they’re only doing these in the morning, I’ll never see them. But are there actually any deals being pushed through Bing yet?

If anyone has seen some actual deals, let me know if the comments below.

I’m guessing that most of you who read this blog know about Southwest’s “Ding!” application. In short, you download a program that stays open on your computer. If you’re connected to the internet, you will receive an alert when Southwest publishes special sale fares. These can sometimes be up for only a couple of hours, and you’ll only be able to access them by clicking on a link in the application. The last couple of weeks, Southwest has made a splash with a lot of $25 to $50 one way fares throughout the US and you could only find them on Ding!.

It’s a great program because it enables Southwest to keep in constant contact with its customers. If they keep it up with compelling content, they have a very captive audience that acts like Pavlov’s dog any time they hear the ding alert. So it was only a matter of time before others followed the same strategy. I just didn’t know it would be such a blatant rip-off. Behold, Ryanair’s Bing! application.

Um, yeah. It’s the one on the left, looking eerily similar to Ding! over on the right. And it works the same way too.

The application sits in your system tray (in your start bar on Windows) and then a little envelope shows up when deals arrive. Click it and it opens those windows with a link to see the deals.

It’s definitely unreal how little effort Ryanair put into this thing in terms of creativity. Nice work, Southwest, for creating a program others want to steal so badly that they can’t even be bothered to tweak it.