Editor’s note (April 2026): This post was originally published in 2019 and reflected Ryanair’s announcement of Ryanair Choice at that time. Since then, Ryanair launched Ryanair Prime in March 2025, but closed it to new members in November 2025 after saying the trial cost more than it generated. An update and further analysis appear below the original article.

Ryanair has recently announced the launch of a new annual membership called Ryanair Choice, costing €/£199 per annum.

For buying a Ryanair Choice membership you receive the following benefits on all your Ryanair flights:

• Priority boarding
• Fast track airport security (where available)
• An allocated standard seat
• 10kg checked luggage

As a loyalty consultant and a fan of paid membership models, I always like delving a little deeper to determine if a valuable consumer proposition really does exist.

After doing some due diligence, I discovered that if a customer was going to purchase the above items individually, a return flight might set them back approximately €/£50, meaning that at least 4 flights per annum would need to be taken to break even on the membership. This tells me that the membership is unlikely to be targeting leisure travellers, but rather business travellers.

Now that we’ve established the likely target segment, are the benefits actually valuable? That depends on how frequently they are used by Ryanair’s regular travellers, of which there were 10 million in January 2019 alone.

Given Ryanair’s baggage policy, 10kg of checked luggage may appeal to some segments that travel for multiple days, but an argument for frequency of use could be put forward, given many business flyers travel light. Seat choice, whilst a nice to have, wouldn’t really impact airline choice.

If we now consider that fast track airport security isn’t available everywhere, we are left with only one benefit that applies to everyone who purchases the membership – priority boarding. I certainly don’t underestimate its attractiveness however, given it’s a staple benefit across every single airline frequent flyer program in the world. But when considering the 10kg of checked luggage may still be used reasonably often, I’d say we have 2 pretty valuable benefits out of 4.

Overall, this looks like a reasonable proposition for a low-cost carrier. However, for most using low-cost carriers, the flight cost still remains the primary consideration, which is why this incremental expense may not be all that attractive.

Now, if you were commuting once a week, you could potentially save around €/£2,600, as opposed to buying these benefits each time. In that instance, Ryanair Choice would absolutely be of serious value.

When the program goes live later this year, it will be available to anyone, once the membership fee is paid. Ryanair is aiming for 100,000 memberships in its first year.

For me, the main question will be around how many memberships Ryanair is likely to keep on a recurring basis and what those all-important year on year net growth / net churn figures will look like. I wish them well.

Update: What happened to Ryanair Choice and Ryanair Prime?

Ryanair Choice did not go on to become a long-term fixture in the way its 2019 announcement may initially have suggested. Ryanair later revisited the paid membership space in March 2025 with Ryanair Prime, priced at €79/£79 per year. The offer included reserved seats, travel insurance and access to member-only seat sales.

However, in November 2025 Ryanair closed Prime to new members after an eight-month run. Reports at the time noted that the scheme attracted 55,000 members against a stated cap of 250,000, generated more than €4.4 million in subscription revenue, and delivered more than €6 million in discounts.

Of course, those headline figures only tell part of the story. If you were carrying out a full assessment of a paid membership model, you would go beyond subscription revenue versus reported member discounts and ask some broader questions. Did members actually fly more often because they joined? Did the scheme win sales away from competitors? How much of the reported discount value was truly additional cost, versus value applied to seats Ryanair may have needed to price aggressively anyway? And how much value sat in benefits that were available, but not always used?

Even so, the public outcome still points to the core issue. For this kind of model to work, the customer offer and the economics have to line up in a way that makes sense at scale. That may be particularly difficult in the low-cost sector, where customers are often conditioned to shop for the best fare on the day rather than build loyalty to a particular airline. By contrast, other low-cost carriers such as Wizz Air and Volotea have their own subscriber memberships which appear to offer simpler, more immediately understood value, typically centred on straightforward discounts and repeat-use savings.

For me, that is the most useful hindsight lens on the original 2019 analysis. Back then, the main question was not whether travellers could derive strong value from a paid Ryanair membership. Clearly they could. The more important question was whether Ryanair could sustain that value exchange on a recurring basis, at scale, in a way that supported the wider economics of the business. In hindsight, that turned out to be exactly the right question to ask.

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