Two drinks before boarding is not a punishment

Ryanair is right about where the drinking problem should be handled, and wrong about the machinery. On January 13, 2025, the airline asked European authorities to cap passengers at two drinks in airport bars, sold against the boarding pass the way duty-free is, and published the 15,350 euro bill it was pursuing from one passenger whose behavior diverted a Dublin to Lanzarote flight to Porto.

Europe’s largest airline asking for limits on alcohol sales is not a natural position. Airlines sell drinks, airports make a great deal of money from terminal bars, and a proposal that costs both of them revenue is worth reading carefully.

The principle is already conceded in the United States. Federal regulation prohibits an airline from boarding a passenger who appears intoxicated and prohibits drinking anything on board that a flight attendant did not serve. Both rules exist because the industry worked out long ago that alcohol and pressurized cabins produce problems that ordinary crowd management cannot solve.

Look at where those rules bite. They bite at the aircraft door and inside the cabin, at the end of the process, at the exact point where refusing someone is most disruptive and most public. A gate agent who declines to board a visibly intoxicated passenger has to do it in front of a hundred and eighty people who are trying to get somewhere, with a departure time running, and with a passenger who has already spent money and has every incentive to argue.

Ryanair’s proposal moves the intervention upstream, to a bar, where the transaction is small and the refusal is routine. Bartenders decline to serve people every day. It happens quietly, and it does not delay a hundred and eighty people.

The public is not conflicted about the behavior. In YouGov’s May 2024 survey, 82 percent of Americans said getting drunk on a flight is unacceptable, sitting alongside watching a show without headphones at 81 percent. There is no meaningful constituency for drunkenness at 35,000 feet. There is a constituency for being trusted to manage your own drinking, which is a different thing and a more sympathetic one.

The objections are real. A cap treats the nervous flier and the holidaymaker as pre-offenders. Two drinks over four hours for someone who has eaten is not the same as two drinks in twenty minutes for someone who has not. And scanning a boarding pass against a bar tab means a system, a cost, staff training, and a boarding pass that has quietly become a tracking document.

None of that is fatal, because the alternative we are currently running is worse. We sell as much as anyone wants to buy in the terminal, ask a gate agent to make a judgment call in ninety seconds, then ask a crew of four, whose first responsibility is the safety of everyone on board, to manage the consequences at altitude with no ability to remove anybody. When that chain fails, the number at the end of it is 15,350 euros and a plane full of people in the wrong country.

The modest version of the idea would get most of the benefit. Service standards in airside bars: no doubles before a flight, no serving someone who is already unsteady, and a quiet line of communication to the gate when a bar has concerns. That is what a well-run bar anywhere already does, applied where the consequences of getting it wrong are unusually large.

Airlines should also be honest about their own side of it. A carrier that sells drinks in the cabin and then complains about the terminal is making an argument with a hole in it. The FAA logged roughly 1,600 unruly-passenger reports in 2025, and the conversation has to include what gets served after the door closes.

Much pre-flight drinking is not really about drinking. It is about fear, and boredom, and the strange suspended hour in a terminal where a bar is frequently the most pleasant place to sit down. Airports built that environment, then act surprised when people sit in it.

Alcohol is a poor tool for a nervous flier. It takes the edge off for forty minutes, then leaves you dehydrated at altitude, sleeping badly, and considerably less able to handle a delay or a diversion when one arrives. Water and something to eat will do more for the next six hours than the third drink will, and I say that as someone who spent twenty-four years watching several thousand people test the proposition.

Set the ceiling at two yourself, before anyone sets it for you. The third drink is the one that turns a long day into a story you did not want to be in. Ryanair asked Europe to make it a rule. You can make it your own, this week, and nobody has to scan anything.