Are Ryanair taking the mickey on hidden "Fees" again?

jammin_2

What a rip off.

cactusdust

I really don't see what the issue is.. sure MOL might be a little bit wacky, the staff might be a bit rude, the boarding process can be nothing less than stroke inducing at times, the food is probably awful and over priced.

However none of that matters when I can fly on Europe's Favourite airline to the Emerald Isle for little short of £12.00 return. Ryanair aren't my favourite airline (would you believe it?) but they're not as corrupt as you make them out to be.. besides, I'm sure someone would have closed them down already. Fly along with their T&Cs and you'll be fine.

malkie76

I'm still failing to get the 'acting unlawfully' claims. That's maybe your opinion, but it certainly isn't shared by the governing bodies who actually matter.
Choose another carrier - simple as.

richardw

2sides2everystory wrote: »

the promotion of false prices

The subjective bit is 'promotion' of the blue prices and whether they are promoted or not.

Are they just listed as price levels on different days or are they being promoted?

2sides2everystory

Thank you for bringing the thread back towards its original track richard.

It actually does not make any difference whether the commercial practice I highlighted is "marketing", "listing of prices" or "promotion".

It is simply unlawful for a business to adopt any "commercial practice which materially distorts or is likely to materially distort the economic behaviour of the average consumer with regard to the product"

The majority of posters in this forum are not "average consumers" and are simply deniers of the problems average consumers face when they go through the booking process.

It doesn't matter whether they arrived at the ryanair website because of what they heard down the pub, read on MSE, or saw in a newspaper ad. The fact is their economic behaviour is materially distorted once they engage with the blue prices nonsense.

I booked 5 more ryanair flights last night. Friends I am visiting told me "you need to book on Wednesday such and such a date because it is £12.99 and there's only one seat left at that price".

I visited the website. The £12.99 price was there alright and I selected it before it disappeared but the minimum achievable cost for that Wednesday such and such a date product was £18.99.

After I'd bought it, the blue price went up to £19.99 which was equally unachievable.

My friends and I are frequent flyers so we are not average consumers either - yet our economic behaviour was distorted - before I bought it, we were even discussing the particular flight (product) versus flight products on other dates using the '£12.99' label - for it to have been a proper economic discussion of prices on different dates we should have been discussing it as the '18.99' flight - I rest my case.

So, if the majority of Ryanair fans who expressed a preference in this thread so far simply don't care whether Ryanair adheres to all laws relating to its business and who rely on others to maintain the balance between lawfulness and distorting fellow consumers' behaviour, then that's a little sad I think, especially on a site like MSE.

The "governing bodies" are not the law, and whether they are fit for enforcing the law is another matter.

malkie76

So why haven't they been closed down ?
And you still haven't answered the question as to who is forcing you to fly RyanAir ?

richardw

Where is 'economic behaviour' defined?

2sides2everystory

:rotfl::T :rotfl:

Well it's a law not an insurance policy, richard, so the definitions section is probably a work in progress.

Meantime, seems like Cameron set up a nudge unit to improve our understanding of it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/sep/09/cameron-nudge-unit-economic-behaviour

richardw

It's an EU directive http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32005L0029:EN:HTML

and Economic Behaviour is not defined in Article 2.

Article 2(e) states

"(e) "to materially distort the economic behaviour of consumers" means using a commercial practice to appreciably impair the consumer's ability to make an informed decision, thereby causing the consumer to take a transactional decision that he would not have taken otherwise.."

2sides2everystory

Bear with me, I feel I might now have to look up the word 'acquis' very shortly ....

Ah maybe not ... see here richard, in Article 2 they have chosen to define a longer phrase with the eb bit in the middle:

(e) "to materially distort the economic behaviour of consumers" means using a commercial practice to appreciably impair the consumer's ability to make an informed decision, thereby causing the consumer to take a transactional decision that he would not have taken otherwise;

And so now we might ask what does "appreciably impair" mean?