Sitting on a beautiful “gullet” parked in the harbour of an ultra-busy Marmaris resort in Turkey, I am reminded why Turkey is the clear Summer 2025 winner.

My flight from Manchester to Turkey with Turkish-based Sun Express was fully booked, and if I had booked it today, it would have cost a reasonable £297. Demand remains high for this excellent value destination, where new hotels continue to be built each season as the main resorts extend further along the scenic coastline, and it has easily absorbed the additional 11% of holidaymakers arriving this year.

Talking to holiday makers in various bars last night and asking who they had travelled with was like playing a proverbial game of tennis as I was repeatedly told “On the Beach: Love”, “On the Beach: Love”, and so it is clear that these UK OTA’s are clearing up, by turning the plentiful flight stock from Sun Express, Pegasus and Corendon Airlines into low cost ATOL bonded packages.

Sun Express, because its aircraft are based downstream in Dalaman and Antalya, can serve 11 of the UK’s 13 main leisure airports with direct flights, opening demand from the entire UK, rather than Jet2, which must open a new UK base every time it wants to expand. However, before the advent of OTAs with UK-wide reach, foreign airlines struggled to establish a presence in the UK because their brands weren’t known. However, customers who trust “On the Beach” (OTB) are rarely bothered by which flight they are assigned to, as they know that, as the ATOL holder, OTB will resolve any issues that occur.

This interesting dynamic means that Turkey has control over its tourism industry in a way few destinations have and can potentially control capacity to avoid over-tourism or excess seat capacity that drags down prices.

The UK’s latest market this year has been particularly “fragile”, with flight stock clearing exceeding demand for destinations like Majorca. For peak season August dates, you can snap up a £34 return fare with Ryanair if you’re willing to travel from Newcastle. However, with many other fares below £50 from across the country, why bother?

The only problem is that Spanish hoteliers have also learned their lesson and now operate based on 80% load factors, keeping prices high to force the pain of discounting holiday prices on low-cost airline seats.

Fascinatingly, industry colleagues tell me that demand fluctuates by the day and that we are back to the days when the best indication of demand is given by a glance out of the window at the weather.

The hot early summer, combined with children who now entertain themselves with on-demand TV, interactive video games with friends or social media, has left parents with the ability to make a late choice on a summer holiday based on the weather and their desire to travel, rather than the historic urgent need to break up a long summer school break with a holiday aboard.

This is great for the holiday maker, but less than ideal for a low-cost carrier yield model that assumes it will be able to increase prices close to departure as the aircraft sells out. This may be the first summer that we have seen the low-cost carriers overreach themselves, and I wait with fascination to see their next announcements to the city.

Inevitably, this will lead to a doubling down of their efforts to grow their early booking in-house tour operators, so watch out for an even bigger Easyjet Holiday next year, given that they still represent less than 5% of their parent airline’s carryings and don’t forget my predictions about Rynair stepping into the space via acquisition.

We have had a hot summer 2025, but the heat may increase further in 2026.

Like them or loathe them as a customer, as a businessman, it’s very hard not to admire the success and growth that Ryanair has achieved since its inaugural flight on 8 July 1985, with a 15-seat Embraer Bandeirante turboprop flying from Waterford (Ireland) to London Gatwick.

Interestingly, their first £99 flight price is probably higher than most of their fares this August, as excess flight stock for the first time is coming home to roost for low-cost carriers that appeared to know no restrictions on growth.

Ryanair has always known who to attack with their low fares model, and after devastating Irish flag carriers like Aer Lingus, they have moved around Europe picking off one fat scheduled airline after another, whilst keeping a healthy competition with the likes of EasyJet and Jet2.com.

Few global airlines have been shaped by just one person; however, the arrival of a young Michael O’Leary in 1988, when he was promoted from Tony Ryan’s personal aide to Chief Financial Officer of the rapidly expanding Ryanair, is a notable example. For me, this was a key milestone in their history because of the low-cost model he introduced.

In 1990, confronted with financial peril, O’Leary is credited with restructuring the airlines to a “no-frills” budget carrier openly modelled after the successful USA carrier Southwest Airlines. Ryanair quickly eliminated business class and free in-flight meals, standardised its fleet to a single aircraft type, and targeted a 25-minute turnaround for flights, a model it’s never strayed from since.

From its modest beginnings at Stansted in 1991, Ryanair has steadily negotiated with underutilised airports and weak tourist boards to secure operating subsidies. These, along with its bulk purchasing of aircraft, have given it an estimated 30% lower operating cost per seat compared to competitors like EasyJet and Jet2.

This has undoubtedly been a key driver of Ryanair’s success, as although many customers dislike Ryanair’s harsh customer service ethos, they continue to book by the millions, as Ryanair delivers the best on-time arrival statistics of any low-cost airline in the sector and unbeatable prices.

Let’s face it, when it’s a 2-4 hour short-haul flight, convenient local airports and ultra-low prices will trump national carriers and often competing low-cost operations.

The airline would not have achieved this dominance if it had not been for some bold decision-making along the way, such as outrightly turning down a takeover bid by Aer Lingus in its early days in 1993 and launching the public IPO in 1997 that allowed it to raise the funds needed for a $2 billion deal for 45 Boeing 737-800s, which is credited with beginning the airline’s operational efficiency advantage.

However, it was Ryanair’s early adoption of the Internet and the creation of a direct-sell airline, which outright rejected traditional sales methods such as travel agents, that propelled its rapid growth in the early 2000s.

I therefore find it ironic that Ryanair has finally realised it is missing out on this channel after watching its rivals, Jet2 and later EasyJet, develop highly profitable tour operations to replace the giant, vertically integrated tour operators that its low-cost yield model had destroyed.

For years, Ryanair did not realise how many millions of their seats were being included in holidays sold by OTAs and travel agents using Dynamic Packaging tools. However, their attempt to block this route in January 2024 through strict identity verification rules for customers who booked via third parties backfired dramatically, causing an immediate drop in both load factors and seat yields.

Again, Ryanair’s reaction was quick and bold. From one day calling third-party agents ‘Pirates’ for illegally adding charges to Ryanair flights, O’Leary quietly made a 360-degree turn and struck deals with all the major UK OTAs, developing a fee-free API that has taken a large share of seat sales from rivals EasyJet and Jet2.

Transforming from the anti-Christ to the preferred affordable partner of OTAs took less than six months and has opened a new route to reach’ Package Holiday’ customers without the hassle of developing their own technology, distribution, or incurring ATOL liabilities.

However, Ryanair are leaving a large part of the holiday profit in third-party hands and not exploiting the free spin-off traffic from their airline site in the same way Easyjet is.

EasyJet Holidays is highly profitable, primarily because it has very low customer acquisition costs, as most of its traffic originates from EasyJet brand searches, rather than costly Google advertising for destinations, resorts, or hotels.

Not owning the profits from the tour operation also prevents Ryanair from using holiday packages as a convenient and opaque way to dump excess seats into package holidays discreetly.

Given that 2025 is the summer when the wave of low-cost expansion finally ran aground on the rocks of excess capacity, there is only one logical next step.

My prediction is that Ryanair will take a bold step again and acquire both the privately owned Love Holidays and the publicly listed On the Beach holidays, to gain control of a substantial 7 million share of the package holiday market. To put things into perspective, it will cost Ryanair less than the price of 10 aircraft if they manage to secure both for the estimated $ 1 billion required.

Ryanair’s customer service ethos might stop its brand from becoming a package holiday provider, but targeting 70% of these newly acquired OTAs’ flight stock to be Ryanair via these established holiday brands is achievable and offers multiple benefits.

Watch this space, as Ryanair is not going to slow down, even at the age of 40, and will continue to make bold decisions under O’Leary.