Ryanair plans to introduce electronic bingo to flights

Ryanair is to introduce on-board electronic bingo and other gaming to its flights.

The company yesterday announced it had teamed up with internet company Jackpotjoy.com to start offering gaming to visitors to its website and, from next year, to passengers on its planes.

Bingo, blackjack, fruit machines and scratch-cards are among the games that will be offered. Jackpots could be in excess of £200,000, the airline said.

Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, said: "A lot of people are, frankly, bored on flights. We believe they will have a high propensity to get involved in these sorts of games."

The on-board gaming will probably be offered through passengers' own mobile phones, though the details have not yet been worked out. Prize jackpots would be pooled with web users to make the sums bigger.

Referring to bingo, Mr O'Leary quipped: "We might have the pilot calling out the numbers. That would get everybody's attention."

Mr O'Leary envisaged that passengers would pay 50p or £1 per game of bingo. He said Ryanair aimed to raise the proportion of revenues from ancillary activities, such as gaming, from 16 per cent to 20 per cent of the group. In September, Ryanair announced a five-year contract with an advertising company, InviseoMedia, to install seat-back ads on all of its aircraft in another effort to generate income from passengers during flights.

With the latest initiative, the company is taking advantage of a captive audience, and the huge traffic to its website to these games - from Ryanair.com, consumers would click through to the Jackpotjoy site. Ryanair will share revenues with the gaming operator.

Online gambling has been the subject of international controversy and the US Congress in effect banned it last month.