Airline Charges Rip-off

ynot2005

headpin wrote: »

Of course it's a Rip Off. They have to offer one means of paying that does not attract a fee. Most reasonable businesses would offer the means tha the majority of people would use. i.e a maestro, Visa or Masercard. The reason they chose Electron is because most people have never even heard of it, very few financial institutions issue it and by the time most people realise they will be ripped for using their normal plastic means of payment they cannot be bothered to abandoned the booking.

And, as the original OP says, the fee that they incur to process the transaction is nothing like the fee they pass on to their customers. Perhaps adding say 50% maybe acceptable, but they are charging something like 500% more to users of normal debit cards. I'm sure even Mr T doesn't have much in his store with a 500% mark up on it, and certainly not a tin of beans?

Finally, lets not lose sight of the fact that this is suppose to be a money saving site. These huge extras that are added on to the headline price are conveniently ignored in order to mislead (and confuse?) the consumer. FACT. They raise false expectation that the supplier knows will then be difficult for the consumer to supress. The majority of these so called “extras” are all known and fixed costs and could and should be included in the headline price. All major airlines manage to do, it including Easyjet.

We should all be pressing to see clear, fair and available pricing. We should not be trying to justify devious and deceitful marketing and pricing policies by companies that should know better. Or have they an ulterior motive? Is this a money saving site or not?

its just as misleading with easyjet, they show the price of the flight which includes hold luggage and insurance thrown in, they hope the consumer clicks away and purchases without thinking, and they use free electron too

a fuss about nothing headpin, with ryanair you choose wether to add bags, add priority boarding, add insurance, pay no booking charges, its not fixed costs at all, its a booking process where each indvidual can choose the level of service and costs to suit them

whats fair and available pricing?, the level of service you want headpin or what i want?, times have changed everyone dosent get lumped together with one headline price.

what we are talking about is a few seconds on the internet to find out the real cost of the flight, misleading the consumer, the consumer finds it difficult to supress blah blah blah, go and book with the major airlines if you want it all so easy peasy to understand and forget about the penny/£5/£10 flights with ryanair and pay hundreds instead

moneysaving is exactly what ryanair is, read the umpteen threads and posts with glowing reports about these remarkable deals, they dont mention deceitfull, devious practices becasue they know paying £1 for a flight is not ripping anyone off

although i can see you point that some consumers could get seduced by the £1 headline flight price, make arrangements and commitments and then shock horror its gone up to £41 and they are hopping mad, becasue they want hold luggage , priority boarding, insurance and thought it was all in the £1 price

nef_uk

"go and book with the major airlines if you want it all so easy peasy to understand and forget about the penny/£5/£10 flights with ryanair and pay hundreds instead"

I have to agree that Ryanair is cheap, but they still annoy me intensely. There is no value in been an apologist for bad business practice and just saying ' go somewhere else if you don't like it', is condoning their bad practice. I deeply feel that Ryanair are dishonest in their misleading presentation of the cost of flights.

Today, i saw tickets to Belfast advertised at £1 /passenger each way. Total expected cost for my wife and I would be £4. (Yes i know this is ludicrously cheap, but it's not me who is pretending to sell the tickets for this price). I don't want any of the frills or extras so i go straight to the payment, where there's a whopping £16 surcharge for any form of payment available to me (no i don't have an Electron card). The point is that they have now increased the cost by a factor of five. Most people will pay by Mastercard, Visa or Switch and Ryanair know that - that is what makes them con artists, they know in advance that the true cost will be many times the advertised price, for most people. It's still good value, but instead of having a happy customer, they now have an angry customer who feels the vendor has tried to take advantage of him. This cannot be good for Ryanair, in the long term.

M4RKM

nef... but.. but... but..... YOU KNOW IN ADVANCE OF THE £16 CHARGE... so it isn't a con..

dictionary definition

persuade (someone) to do or believe something, typically by use of a deception : I conned him into giving me your home number | she was jailed for conning her aunt out of $500,000.

there is no deception going on, as you are told the price before you book.. the only way it could be a con, is if the price wasn't displayed, they took a payment for the £4, and then on the day of the flight, charge you again...

M

Paddy2eyes

At £4 card fee, they are ripping us off, but at 1p or £1 per flight are we not ripping them off? I always look at the total booking price for what I need and decide from that if it is good value and if I should go ahead and book.

moonrakerz

This site wont let me post S!!!!horpe, or s!!!, or b!!!!!, or ....., or.....

Can we please have it so that it won't post: r!! o!! or s!!m - I really get p!!!!d off with the gratuitous use of these expressions ! (that was an exclamation mark - not a deleted expletive)

:mad::mad:

budgetflyer

If it really annoyed me that much paying a booking fee, Id get an Electron card just for that purpose.

At worse, if you know someone with one, get them to book for you.

To be honest,with fuel costs these days. I reckon if you can fly somewhere for 50/60 quid per person all in ie Edinburgh to London then thats a pretty good deal as I reckon a couple would struggle to drive it for any less

kingston_toon

ynot2005 wrote: »

although i can see you point that some consumers could get seduced by the £1 headline flight price, make arrangements and commitments and then shock horror its gone up to £41 and they are hopping mad, becasue they want hold luggage , priority boarding, insurance and thought it was all in the £1 price

They don't have to pay though, do they? I get seduced by the £1 headline fares all the time and always end up travelling for... wait for it... £1! If you want hold luggage, priority boarding and insurance, then don't get hopping mad because it costs you more... of course it's going to cost you more, and the website tells you this before you click "pay". I'm still amazed how many people stick in their credit / debit card numbers without being totally sure what they're paying for!

nef_uk

markymoo wrote: »

nef... but.. but... but..... YOU KNOW IN ADVANCE OF THE £16 CHARGE... so it isn't a con..

dictionary definition

persuade (someone) to do or believe something, typically by use of a deception : I conned him into giving me your home number | she was jailed for conning her aunt out of $500,000.

there is no deception going on, as you are told the price before you book.. the only way it could be a con, is if the price wasn't displayed, they took a payment for the £4, and then on the day of the flight, charge you again...

M

I hear what you say, Markymoo, but i still think they are behaving dishonestly because they know that the majority of customers will be unable to take advantage of the advertised price. The discreditable part is that the 'extras' add up to many times the original price. I would have been a happier customer (and had much more respect for them as a company), if they had charged more in total, but advertised the price correctly.

If this were a different company, Tesco for example, and you saw bread on offer at 10P, put it in your basket and went to pay, only to find out at the till that the actual cost was £4, would you continue to use Tesco? I doubt it. This scenario would be unthinkable, because as we know, Tesco is a reputable company. Wheras Ryanair (and many of the other holiday related companies who use similar annoying tactics) is.... well decide for yourself.

M4RKM

i'd say that the majority of their customers can get hold a visa electron card if they want... so that throws your tesco argument out of the water..


how come no one complained when M&S charges you 5p for a bag... my £1 bread now costs me £1.05p because i want a bag to put it in....

your £1 flight, costs £9 because you're too lazy to get an electron card..

if i don't need extras, lots of £0 mean i can get a flight for £1... you can't, because you prefer to whinge, rather than spend your time effectively, applying for the halifax account where you can get an electron card..

M

Saint_Chris

wow, i've woke up to

groundhog day again