Ryanair Mastercard Prepaid option Neteller: Are their currency exchange rates fair?

qwertymz wrote: »

Bought a GBP-based Ryanair flight with my EUR Net+ card yesterday - somehow, £92 went up to €114!!! (My estimates put £92 at around €100..)

Whilst paying I had a "You will be paying €114. For more information click here" - but I never saw the option to decline, and let payment be taken in GBP.

Any idea, anyone?

Hello,

it is very, very tricky. We all know that with the lowcost airlines you have to be very careful not to include any insurance, speedy or priority boarding, etc etc, but this one is extremely tricky. It happened to me a couple of times that I mistakenly paid the Ryanair exchange rate.

Two days ago I booked a Ryanair outgoing flight from the UK priced in GBP and wanted to pay with my Neteller Mastercard Prepaid denominated in EUR. If I remember correctly, you have to do the following:

1) Go to the payment page. Nothing is there yet regarding exchange rate, because after all you could still pay with a GBP denominated card:



2) Then enter your card details and do NOT confirm the transaction.

3) Somehow from the card details the Ryanair page knows that the card is EUR denominated. At this stage and only at this stage, there appears a sum in EUR and a link near the EUR amount saying More Information.



4) If you go to this link, a popup appears and Ryanair explains you that they guarantee you this safe rate which is much better than the potentially bad rate from your card.



Read carefully and do NOT accept Ryanair's rate by unticking the box and go for billing in GBP. Read carefully, at least in my opinion it is not very clearly worded (I am not an English native speaker). Note down for the record the amount Ryanair wanted to charge you in EUR.

5) After unticking the box (which means choosing billing in GBP and letting your Mastercard provider do the currency exchange), click Close to return to the usual payment page and proceed with your payment.

6) If I remember correctly, if you (wrongly) choose to accept Ryanair's rate, then there is no option to go back and you have to go with it, unless you start the booking again.

7) After the booking, login to your Neteller account, check how much Neteller has charged you in EUR. In this example, Neteller used a rate of 1.2068449 GBP/EUR compared to 1.2514079 GBP/EUR suggested by Ryanair. This is about 4% more expensive than the Neteller rate, who usually give a very good rate. Neteller charged 36.18 EUR. In this case, the difference is not very big (1.34 EUR), this is because the ticket was quite cheap. As soon as you buy a more expensive ticket or several tickets at one, the absolute amount becomes bigger and more worth the effort.

8) Relax and have a beer thinking about the 4% you saved :beer:

Hope this helps and clarifies. Edited and added pictures. Happy booking!