Reasons I’ll never fly Ryanair again

Jakkals

1.Price: Just for fun I just tried to book a bargain £5 flight from London to Dublin. By the time I got to the payment section, the total round trip cost for one passenger, on the cheapest flights listed was £69.98. That was including the only truly optional extra, one checked bag each way (£15 each way if booked online, £35 each way otherwise). The other “optional fees/charges” aren’t optional at all – you have to check in (£5 each way online, £10 otherwise) and there’s only one way of paying that avoids the £5 each way “administrative” charge , regarding which the Office of Fair Trading accused Ryanair of being "puerile and childish").

2.“Optional Costs:” Are the added costs “optional”? The only “extra” I asked for was a checked bag – how many people can carry enough clothes to get everything in the one free carry-on bag (10 kg allowed, including toiletries, a book or two, a second pair of shoes)? I’ve seen people quoted as saying that it is cheaper to buy the clothes you want at your destination than to pay the check-in charge, but assuming you want to bring your new clothes back, you have £15 to spare to buy new clothes. Must be really low clothes prices somewhere that nobody has told me about!

This is the financial reality of Ryanair’s claim that they can keep prices low by not including costs of items not everyone wants – like boarding cards?

Beware the ubiquitous “prices from…” phrase, and not just when you see them in airline ads.

3.Check in: Want to get a seat assigned? No way. Get priority boarding? £4 per person per leg to get on among the first passengers. Want to take sports equipment? No problem, just £40 per item each way. Second check-in bag? Only for Bill Gates – £35 each way (or £70 each way if you don’t do it online).

4.On Board joys: No seat pockets! Never seen this before on any airline. Put your newspaper or book on the floor, then. Does this keep your fare down? (Let’s not even talk about legroom). And of course we all know better than to buy food or drink on a plane, those luxuries – like water – that used to be included in the price of a ticket. On Ryanair a half-litre bottle of water, for example, will cost you about five times the cost of petrol and 30 times what it would in your local supermarket. Buy it in a boarding area shop – not cheap compared to outside the airport but not £6 a litre.

5.“Customer service” – an oxymoron: Perhaps someone will start a FawltyAir company sometime and take the prize from Ryanair, but they’ll have to work very hard to do that.

A few months ago I booked a return flight (London-Tenerife) on Ryanair. (The £16.45 per person for each leg in the ad came to a total of £175.53, and that is before we added a single check-in bag for another £30).

Aha! I noticed a charge of £12.59 for insurance. I thought I’d declined this, but apparently you have to do this for each passenger and I’d only done it once. No problem. The flight was three months off and I’d just cancel the insurance. One quick phone call – oh, how naive can I be? The 10p per minute customer service phone number had me holding a while; I could have tried the “priority assistance” number, but at £1 per minute didn’t seem a cost effective option.

Simple alternative -- e-mail them! No e-mail addresses on their website, so I turned to Google. Found five e-mail addresses of various managers and wrote to each requesting cancellation of the insurance and a refund of my 12 quid. Not a single reply (except an automated “out of office” message from two of the addresses – evidence that the addresses were getting the message to people at Ryanair). OK, back to the 10p telephone number; eventually got through the telephone tree to a human, to whom I explained what I wanted. “No,” he said, “no refund.” Why, I asked? “Policy,” he replied irrefutably.

Stymied, I disputed the charge through my credit card company and after numerous e-mails, telephone calls, and forms sent to them by regular mail I got my 12 quid back. Probably cost me more than that in calls and postage, not to mention several hours of my time, but a moral victory nevertheless.

But Ryanair still had one more trick up their sleeve to take money from me and help them keep their fares “the lowest in Europe.” They ripped me off on the dollar-sterling exchange rate! I used an American credit card to pay for the tickets. On the date I paid the exchange rate was $1.64 to the pound, so the charge of £175.53 should have been billed as $287.87. I was billed $305.71 (Exchange rate of $1.74/£), for an overcharge of $17.84. That’s about 6 percent more than I should have paid.

I disputed this too with my credit card company but eventually gave up and accepted the defeat. Sometimes moral victories are too exhausting to pursue to the end.

[FONT=&quot]And the headlines? “Ryanair shrinks losses and raises profits forecast[/FONT][FONT=&quot].” “[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Ryanair charges fail to put off travelers[/FONT][FONT=&quot].” Not much hope for change while they thrive and prosper regardless of passenger comfort and convenience (and real cost), but at least I can promise them one passenger less!! [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]-- Jakkals[/FONT]

HeidiHi123

Usually

OK.

It costs more than £1 to fly you from London to Dublin (or whereever). You know that, I know that, Ryanair knows that.

So why do expect that you will or should pay only £1. (or £5 or whatever magical sum is on offer today).

Ryanair need to make a profit. They have to, to keep those planes in the air. They're not a funded charity. So, yes, if you're going to get bargain bucket seats for £1/£5/£10 or whatever, you're going to have to fork out in other areas for other services. Yes, expect to pay £3 for a cup of tea!

Unless, of course, you really do expect Ryanair to fly you from one place to another, at a loss, out of the goodness of their own heart!

Wake up and smell (the £3) coffee!!

ckerrd

"Just for fun I just tried to book a bargain £5 flight from London to Dublin"

If it gives so much grief do try other leisure pursuits

Inactive

Yes

I think that the OP needs to get out more, if that is their idea of wasting time.:(

lfc321

Never

I don't fly with them, but not for any of those reasons. We all know about the extra charges and lack of service. I actually agree with the Ryanair supporters who will be jumping down your throat right about now - the extra charges are all set out in the T&Cs: if you don't like the final price then fly with someone else.

Personally I don't fly with Ryanair because of their attitude to disabled people. For that reason they're not a company I choose to give my business to. But I wouldn't insist that others take the same stance as me - it's a personal ethical decision and others have different views - that's fine.

Each to his own, I say.

malkie76

Everything you are grumbling about is in plain english on their website - you pay for the services you want, and don't get charged for things you don't need. The model clearly works, but isn't to everyone's taste - if you are desperate for a free cup of water on a 1hour flight then book with a full service carrier.

If you are popping somewhere for a weekend with a single carry on, and a sandwich from Pret, then LCC are for you.

voiceofreason

Usually

"Never fly Ryanair again"?

It doesn't look like you flew with them at all - so will you amend the misleading title of this thread to reflect?

Personally, I don't much care for flying with Ryanair and will avoid them wherever possible, but not because of the (well-documented elsewhere to the point of numbness) reasons you've stated, OP, but because their cabin crew and other customer-facing ops are shoddy and slapdash to the point of potentially being dangerous.

I wouldn't be happy relying on them in an emergency......

As for what you've written here, I don't much see what your issue is. Yes, there are these added charges and revenue streams for the airline - but they're applicable to pretty much all low-cost airlines, not just Ryanair. Based on pure price criteria alone (and even taking into account ancillary charges) Ryanair and other LCCs consistently offer a competitive price - hence my vote for "usually a good buy".

But then, you are not being fair or consistent in your rant, are you? You're expecting the services of a full-service airline, your BA or bmi or Aer Lingus or whatever, for the price of a low-cost carrier. And then complaining when you're not getting them.

Why don't you run your findings here, your total price for the ticket, against, say, the total price of a ticket from one of the three airlines I've mentioned above (who all, I think, run a London-Dublin service) and compare the cost for each - and then talk about whether Ryanair's a good buy or whatever.

I can't argue that their customer service - as you've found! - is a joke; indeed, it's my chief disincentive, personally, to fly with Ryanair.

But trotting out some copy-and-pasted, facile nonsense about how expensive Ryanair are - when in fact all the information is there, plain and clear on their website for you to read before you book! - is just lazy.

And I bet you never actually did fly with them, did you?

inflationbusting

I believe there is a job for the OP at the Times! In fact you left out a few things:

http://timesbusiness.typepad.com/money_weblog/2009/03/20-reasons-not-to-fly-ryanair.html

Kudos for using a foreign credit card, they missed out that in the construction of 'most unrealistic passenger type to compare fares'.

I'd point out these inaccuracies:

- The £5 online check-in fee has not been charged on any 'headline' promotional fare - ie - £1/2/5. If you flew to Dublin on a £5 deal, this would not have been charged.
- The insurance defaults to 'Please select your country of residence', and has done for a while.
- Insurance can be cancelled - there is a 14-day cooling off policy. Are you saying Ryanair doesn't offer this? You would have thought the OFT might have pulled them up on this instead of just merely passing comment.
- Email addresses: appears to be one here:
http://www.ryanair.com/en/questions/what-do-i-do-if-i-want-to-cancel-my-travel-insurance-policy

The post smacks of being a bit out of date, with only a few choice bits of data brought in. Which begs the question, why not post it last year instead of now?

Or more to the point, are you Willie/Stelios in disguise?

voiceofreason

Usually

inflationbusting wrote: »

Or more to the point, are you Willie/Stelios in disguise?

Strange you say that - you know, I wondered that myself. Wouldn't be the first company shill to pop up here, would it?

But then I thought about it at a little more length, and came to the conclusion that the OP's just a bandwagon-jumping moron.

dmg24

Usually

lfc321 wrote: »

I don't fly with them, but not for any of those reasons. We all know about the extra charges and lack of service. I actually agree with the Ryanair supporters who will be jumping down your throat right about now - the extra charges are all set out in the T&Cs: if you don't like the final price then fly with someone else.

Personally I don't fly with Ryanair because of their attitude to disabled people. For that reason they're not a company I choose to give my business to. But I wouldn't insist that others take the same stance as me - it's a personal ethical decision and others have different views - that's fine.

Each to his own, I say.

Do you have personal experience of the way they treat disabled passengers, or is your information through the media? My own experience of their treatment of disabled passengers is as good (in some cases better) than other airlines.

lfc321

Never

dmg24 wrote: »

Do you have personal experience of the way they treat disabled passengers, or is your information through the media? My own experience of their treatment of disabled passengers is as good (in some cases better) than other airlines.

I do not and will not fly with Ryanair so have no personal experience of their treatment of disabled passengers. I have of course seen the media reports of the various incidents involving disabled passengers. Several of these incidents led to serious criticisms from major disability charities and one charity (Scope) called for a boycott of Ryanair.

My real problem, though, is with the wheelchair levy and MO’L’s comments after introducing it.

As everyone knows the levy was introduced after Ryanair lost a case brought by the Disability Rights Commission where Ryanair was found to be unlawfully discriminating against disabled passengers. Ryanair then (and still does) added a ‘wheelchair levy’ to the cost of every ticket. The only possible reason for separating this out (and not just absorbing it as a business cost in the same way as every other airline I’ve come across) is to put the blame on disabled passengers for higher fees. The implication is this: we’re sorry the fare isn’t really £1 – blame it on those inconsiderate people who need wheelchairs”.

But this was the real killer for me: When the story broke that the wheelchair levy was far higher than the actual cost of providing wheelchair assistance this was MO’L’s reply (source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/735151/Disabled-groups-attack-33p-Ryanair-levy.html)

"The DRC wouldn't f***ing know how much it costs if it jumped up and bit them,"

A pretty predictable response from MO’L. But then he went on to add:

"We would rather not charge the levy, but we kept getting people who just didn't fancy the long walk to the plane and declared themselves to be in need of assistance."

So there you go. Disabled people: lazy sods who don’t fancy the long walk.

As I said I wouldn’t expect everyone else to share my opinion. But I choose not to use an airline which i) has such policies in place; and ii) publicly expresses such opinions about the disabled.