Budget airline Ryanairhas announced the immediate closure of a loyalty scheme to new customers after failing admitting it was loss-making.

The no-frills carrier only launched its £79 a year Prime subscription in March, offering free reserved seats, free travel insurance and access to 12 annual (one per each month) member-exclusive seat sales.

It claimed that “Prime” members who took a dozen flights per year would save up to £420 , or more than the times the cost of the subscription Ryanair said the scheme was limited to 250,000 members on a first come, first served basis.

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But the Irish airline has now announced it will be scrapped after just 55,000 people signed-up.

Ryanair said all those existing members will continue to get exclusive monthly low fare offers until October next year, but no new members will be allowed to sign up.

Dara Brady, Ryanair’s chief marketing officer, called the scheme a “no-brainer” for frequent flyer when launching it back in March.

But speaking now, he said: “Over the years, customers have asked for a Ryanair members scheme, so we trialled this ‘Prime’ scheme over the last eight months.

“To date, we have signed up over 55,000 Prime members, generating over €4.4m (£3.86m) in subscription fees. However, our Prime members have received over €6m (£5.26m) in fare discounts, so this trial has cost more money than it generates.

“This level of memberships, or subscription revenue does not justify the time and effort it takes to launch monthly exclusive Prime seat sales for our 55,000 Prime members. We are grateful to our 55,000 Prime members who signed up to this Prime trial over the last eight months, and they can rest assured that they will continue to enjoy exclusive flight and seat savings for the remainder of their 12-month membership.”

He went on: “With over 207m passengers this year, Ryanair will continue to focus on delivering the lowest fares in Europe to all our customers, and not this subset of 55,000 Prime members.”

Ryanair recently made a change so that passengers have to use to use digital boarding passes only. Since November 12. passengers will no longer be able to download and print a physical paper boarding pass. Instead, they will have to use the digital boarding pass generated in the “myRyanair” app on their mobile device -smartphone or tablet -during check-in process to board any of its flights.