Ryanair sells its seats shock

Seat backs that is. Europe's low-cost giant Ryanair is exploiting yet another opportunity for ancillary revenue generation by selling advertising on the seat backs across its fleet.

It has announced a deal with a company called InviseoMedia to install seatback advertising on its entire current and future fleet of 239 Boeing 737-800s. The "Inviseo Table" is a special tray table with an advertising panel built into it. Ryanair stresses that this latest money making venture will only make a couple of million Euros annually, but that every cent counts.

Ryanair is an arch exponent of raising ancillary revenues, which it is growing rapidly. The mainstays of this area are website click-through bookings for car hire, hotel and insurance. Other plans in the pipeline are the use of inflight mobile phones and inflight gambling.

In the seat back initiative, the trays are significant pieces of advertising real estate, being seen by the carrier's 40+ million passengers for an estimated minimum of 40 minutes per flight. Several advertisers are already interested, says Ryanair.

The first carrier to use this type of advertising was germanwings, which began installing them last year. Daimler Chrysler, Nikon, Pentax, Canon and Microsoft have bought space. The revenue is shared with the airline, with Inviseo handling the installation, handling and marketing costs. "Costs to the airline are virtually non-existent," says Inviseo. Now that is music to the ears of the Ryanair boardroom.