Guzzling passengers: should airports limit pre-flight boozing?

A rise in drunken disorder on flights and at airports has led Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary to call for a two drinks per passenger limit at airport bars.

Photos of the "airport pint" have long been an Instagram staple but "booze-fuelled violence" has "surged this summer", said The Telegraph, leading to a conversation about the wisdom and safety of airport boozing.

'Powder and tablets'

Most passengers "show up an hour before departure" said O'Leary, which is "sufficient for two drinks", but if the flight is "delayed by two or three hours you can't be guzzling five, six, eight, ten pints of beer".

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He added that "as long as they can stand up and shuffle", passengers "will get through" boarding and "then when the plane takes off, we see the misbehaviour".

"We don’t want to begrudge people having a drink", he said, "but we don't allow people to drink-drive", yet "we keep putting them up in aircraft at 33,000 feet".

In the past, most drunk passengers fell asleep on the plane, he said, but now, thanks to "powder and tablets", they stay awake, leading to an increase in assaults on cabin crew and confrontations between passengers.

It's "certainly a growing problem", former British Airways pilot Nick Eades, the world's longest-serving Boeing 747 captain, told the broadsheet.

Previously, passengers "would dress up and put a shirt and tie on" for air travel, but now, "flights are so cheap" and "all the airports want to do is get you into the bar and encourage you to drink excessively".

The boss of Turkish-German budget airline SunExpress, Max Kownatzki, told TTG that British travellers are "more high-spend, more hedonistic" after holidaymakers on a flight out of the UK drank the entire stock of booze for a four-hour flight to Turkey in the space of just 25 minutes.

A new YouGov poll of 6,771 British adults found that 62% said they strongly, or tend to, support a two alcoholic drink per passenger limit at airport bars, reported Business Traveller, but some have responded to O'Leary's campaign with cynicism.

'Lairy minority'

Wetherspoons founder Sir Tim Martin told The Times that he's "had no complaints about our pubs from the airport authorities or airlines that I'm aware of in recent years".

Suggesting hypocrisy on the part of the Ryanair boss, Martin pointed out that "years ago" his chain "stopped selling 'shooters' at airports, as well as 'double-up' offers", while O'Leary's airline still "offers a discount on Irish whiskey if a double is ordered".

No one "would ever be so cynical as to note that a limit on consumption in the airport might drive up sales elsewhere", wrote corporate comms professional Gavin Devine on X, but O'Leary's campaign "would be so much more compelling if it was combined with halting sales of booze on board his planes".

"At its best", wrote Sean Thomas in The Telegraph, drinking in airports is "one of the great pleasures of travel". Airports are "crowded, stressful, labyrinthine, bureaucratic" and "full of screaming babies or passengers with 98 items of oversized luggage".

The best way to "de-stress from all this" is "a drink, and maybe four drinks, not two". A "lairy minority" might exist, but airports shouldn't "ruin the fun of the many because of the sins of the few".