Resources for media covering Ask Ryan
Ask Ryan (askryan.ie) is a free parody flight chatbot. You talk (or type) to Ryan, a dry Dublin "flight attendant" voice agent, and he finds real, live Ryanair fares. His party trick is the cheeky flight: two of Ryanair's own legs stitched through a hub for less than the airline's own direct fare on the same route. Built solo by AI engineer Matt Cortland with Claude Code, ElevenLabs and Anthropic's Claude. It is an unofficial parody, not affiliated with Ryanair, and every fare shown is real at the time of search.
The running savings tally and biggest-beats leaderboard are live on the homepage and askryan.ie/beat.
Ryanair prices every route independently, so two of its own legs through a hub regularly cost less than its own direct fare. Ryan checks up to six viable hubs against a cached map of all 5,233 Ryanair routes, pairs each feeder and onward leg in memory, enforces a 2.5 hour minimum connection, and only shows a cheeky flight when the total genuinely beats the direct fare. Tight and overnight layovers are flagged plainly, and Ryan repeats the catch every time: it is two separate bookings, so a late first leg is your problem, not Ryanair's.
Checked 3 July 2026 across departures in the July school-holiday window. Fares are live and move constantly; ask Ryan on the homepage to regenerate any of these, or any route, right now.
| Route | Ryanair direct | Cheeky flight | Saving | Card |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dublin → Budapest | €205.39 | €76.98 via Edinburgh | €128 (63%) | PNG |
| Dublin → Tenerife | €164.99 | €48.20 via Liverpool | €117 (71%) | PNG |
| Dublin → Gran Canaria | €169.39 | €62.98 via Manchester, overnight | €106 (63%) | PNG |
| Dublin → Lanzarote | €137.12 | €44.98 via Liverpool, 5h | €92 (67%) | PNG |
And the honest flip side, from the same sweep: where Ryanair's direct fare was already the cheapest way (Faro €29.99, Palma €25.99, Ibiza €32.24, Barcelona €30.27), Ryan found no beat and said so. He only claims a cheeky flight when the total genuinely undercuts the direct.
These render live as 1200x630 PNGs and are free to publish with credit to askryan.ie. Change the URL parameters to generate your own.
A parody voice agent called Ryan finds real Ryanair fares, then undercuts the airline's direct price by stitching two of its own flights through a hub. He calls it a cheeky flight. The biggest saving logged so far: Dublin to Alicante for €39.98 against a €174.99 direct fare. Every fare is live and real. Unofficial parody, not affiliated with Ryanair.
DUBLIN / LONDON, [LAUNCH DATE]
Ask Ryan is a free chatbot with a dry Dublin attitude. You talk to Ryan (or type), tell him where you fancy going, and he finds real, live Ryanair fares, then tells you the truth about what the cheap seats actually cost: the 6am departure, the bag fee, the airport an hour from the city it is named after.
The trick that makes him worth sharing is the "cheeky flight". Ryanair prices every route independently, so two of its own legs through a hub regularly cost less than its own direct fare on the same day. Ryan checks up to six viable hubs against a map of all 5,233 Ryanair routes, enforces a two-and-a-half-hour connection buffer, warns plainly about tight or overnight layovers, and only shows a cheeky flight when it genuinely beats the direct price. It is two separate bookings, and Ryan says so every time.
"Ryanair are geniuses at pricing individual flights, and that is exactly why you can beat them with their own planes," said Matt Cortland, the AI engineer behind the project. "Ryan just does the arithmetic they would rather you didn't, and he has a bit of fun while he is at it."
In a verified sweep of popular routes during the July school holidays, Ryan beat Ryanair's direct fare on ten of them. Dublin to Budapest: €205.39 direct, €76.98 as a cheeky flight via Edinburgh, a saving of €128. Dublin to Tenerife: €164.99 direct, €48.20 via Liverpool, 71% off. Dublin to Lanzarote: €137.12 direct, €44.98 via Liverpool with a five-hour connection.
He is honest in both directions: on routes where the direct fare was already the cheapest way (Faro at €29.99, Palma at €25.99), Ryan found no beat and said so. He also shows all-in prices with a typical bag, destination weather, and a day-by-day calendar of when a route is cheapest.
Ask Ryan was built solo in under three weeks using Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent. Ryan's voice runs on ElevenLabs' conversational AI platform; his text brain is Anthropic's Claude. His personality was tuned on lines written by real Irish people, and the character is deliberately not Ryanair: he is a parody who roasts the airline in the third person while finding its genuinely cheap fares.
Cortland's previous project, The Guinndex (guinndex.ai), used an AI voice agent to call more than 3,000 Irish pubs for the price of a pint, and was covered by The Journal, Tech.eu and Cybernews.
"Everything Ryan shows you is a real fare you can book on Ryanair's own site," said Cortland. "If he saves you €135, that money stays in your pocket and the flights are still theirs. Honestly, they should be thanking him."
For more information: askryan.ie
Media contact: Matt Cortland, mattcortland.com
Matt Cortland is available for interview. Press assets at askryan.ie/press; all graphics free to publish with credit to askryan.ie.
Matt Cortland is an American AI engineer based in London who lived in Ireland for years. A former US-Ireland Alliance Scholar (formerly the George Mitchell Scholarship), he holds a Master's degree in Creative Digital Media from TU Dublin and previously owned a global pub and entertainment company that operated across Ireland, the UK and US before moving into AI engineering and private consulting. His previous viral project, The Guinndex, indexed the price of a pint across all 32 counties of Ireland.
Unofficial parody, not affiliated with Ryanair. © 2026 Prime Directive AI Ltd.