Ryanair, Scorned in Europe, Turns on the Charm LONDON - Charging 60 euros, or $82, for carry-on bags deemed too large to go in the cabin. Assessing a penalty of €70, or almost $100, for not checking in online. Bombarding passengers who take a 6:15 a.m. plane with in-flight announcements hawking everything, including snacks, lottery tickets and smokeless cigarettes. Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of the budget airline Ryanair, has vowed to address the criticisms that have made his carrier, Europe's biggest and most profitable, its most reviled. It is a change of heart motivated mainly by pragmatism. Even as Ryanair has added routes every few months, Europe's weak economy has taken its toll, leading Mr. O'Leary to issue a warning on profits. Simply put, the company can no longer afford to risk losing customers who would rather pay more to fly on another carrier than endure Ryanair's cattle-car approach to air travel. The shift in tone may not come easily for Mr. O'Leary, a 52-year-old Irishman and famously pugnacious former accountant who has led the airline for nearly 20 years. He is perhaps best known for past proposals like onboard pay toilets, or standing-room "seats" at the back of the airline's Boeing 737s, or charging higher fares to "fat people" - suggestions that never came to fruition but seemed carefully calibrated to offend. Even recently, over coffee one morning, he puzzled aloud about the British news media squall that had followed his first live chat on Twitter the day before, as part of Ryanair's effort to embrace social media - a communications form that Mr. O'Leary has long disdained. During an hour of Twitter posts on Oct. 21 - which was followed by another a few days later - Mr. O'Leary gamely parried a volley of online curiosity and invective with a mix, mostly, of courtesy and quick wit. Yet he had been unable to resist an occasional inappropriate remark - as when he commented on the profile photo of a female questioner, with "Nice pic. Phwoaaarr! To another poster's sarcastic suggestion that Ryanair consider adding extra seats in the cargo hold, he replied: "Not seats but beds. Mile high club anyone? The coarser posts, said Mr. O'Leary - a married father of four young children - were "just to endear myself to all the feministas." "God bless them," he said with a shrug, before quickly veering back on-message. "I think you have to separate the weirdo, cranky, pantomime publicity-generating hound that I am," Mr. O'Leary said, sighing, "from what is a phenomenally successful airline delivering a phenomenal customer service." For many passengers, "phenomenal" and "customer service" might seldom travel in the same Ryanair cabin. The airline has been dogged for years by tales of travelers abandoned to their own devices whenever strikes, erupting volcanoes or foul weather have forced flight cancellations. Last month, Ryanair was pilloried in the British press for charging a doctor from Leicestershire 160 pounds, or nearly $260, to change his flight from Dublin to Birmingham after his entire family had died in a fire. The airline subsequently decided to waive its fee policy in that case and refund the passenger. But for all the detractors, it would be hard for anyone to dispute Ryanair's explosive growth - or the role that its ruthlessly cost-conscious business model has played in transforming Europe's once-cossetted air travel market into one where airlines fiercely compete for every passenger. The airline, founded in 1985 by the Irish billionaire Tony Ryan, has grown from flying 80,000 passengers a year on a single route - Dublin to London - to shuttling roughly 80 million annually among 180 destinations, on a network that extends from Estonia to the Canary Islands. That puts Ryanair well ahead of Europe's next-largest airline by number of passengers, Lufthansa of Germany, which last year transported just over 64 million people. Yet as Europe's economic slump grinds on, even Ryanair is starting to feel the pinch of weakening travel demand. Simply promising low fares and punctual flights - the airline has a good record on both measures - is not enough. Last month the airline warned investors that net profit for its current financial year could fall below last year's record €560 million ($773 million) as it scrambles to fill unsold seats. That would be the Ryanair's first earnings decline in a decade. And so, many analysts say, Mr. O'Leary must find ways to transform its brand to appeal to the millions of travelers who consciously avoid Ryanair.