Image by Ultrastar175g via FlickrOK, so it’s not a huge revelation but Ryanair are, indeed greedy thieving ********. Sneaky, conniving, slippery *****. And that’s just a few of the words I’d use to describe them. Any way they can fiddle you out of more cash, they’ll do it.
I’m booking tickets for some friends for the Graspop trip in June. Three people return from Stansted, one person (me) one-way from Eindhoven to Stansted. All nice and simple. Obviously, there will be credit card fees involved, so I want to book as many flights at once to reduce the fees involved.
OK, so I can’t book three out, 4 in with one transaction. It’s 3 out on one booking, 4 back on another. Or 3 return and then a separate booking for the guy going one-way. Either way, two credit card fees.
Wrong.
Either way it’s SEVEN credit card fees. Ryanair have gone all original and charge per person, per flight segment. So if I were paying on Visa, I could expect a whopping £21 in credit card charges. Frankly – ******* ludicrous. Even using a debit card, it’s £7.
More sneakiness. If you’re booking a flight from Europe to the UK, there is no choice on currency. You pay in Euros. And the flights are rounded to nice, convenient amounts – which are higher than the cost of the flight when booked as part of a return. Example – sterling price for Eindhoven to Stansted is £9.99. Booking it as a single is €14.40. At the current exchange rate this is £11.61. It doesn’t stop there as all the booking fees, card fees, baggage fees, taxes and so on are also lifted. The resultant flight is around a tenner dearer than it would be in Pounds. not to forget that most credit cards / banks charge a fee for dealing in non-sterling.
Add to that their 15kg checked luggage limit – 5kg below that of most other airlines. A 10kg carry-on limit – 2kg below that of others. A baggage check-in fee of £6 for the first bag and £12 for the next. Which necessitates that you check in at the airport… a further £3. Surely if you’re going to check one bag in and therefore have to check in at the airport (as opposed to the free online alternative), they may as well charge you £9 for the bag and include the fee? Ah, but then they’d not be able to claim their baggage fees were low…
Also note that every money-making option is selected on the web page unless you turn it off. As if anyone really wants to pay an extra £6 to be one of the first onto the plane. And insurance is selected by default.
I still loathe their advertising. My flight – according to their advertising – was £9.99. It actually cost me nearer £45. And if you want to complain (or check up on a booking you’re not sure has gone through because their website crashed)? 10p/min in the UK (34c/min in France).
I’m currently stuck as I’ve received no confirmation details for the 6 flights I booked for my friends. Have they been booked? I don’t know. I didn’t get an email confirming the details of the flight I do know went through, so the lack of mail for the other one is no indication at all.
Ryanair – the shittest airline on the planet, budget or not. British Airways may be able to decimate an entire airport terminal in 8 hours, but Ryanair are simply just ****. And greedy. Greedy and ****. And sneaky.
Charging per person is not a new thing – about 10 years ago I got charged in a travel agent for paying by credit card a fee per person – and there was no difference in debit card fees either.
I can sort of understand why they make a charge – because the card issuer makes a charge, as does the bank – but it is a percentage, as they don’t care how many people are travelling!
If Ryanair are so ****, don’t fly with them!
I understand them passing the charge on… but thing is, that’s not what they’re doing. They’re charging you more – as you said, the credit card fee to them will either be a percentage or a flat fee per transaction. It certainly won’t be a flat fee per person per flight segment.
And, sadly, sometimes I have no option. Thing is, all the budget companies pretty much suck and try to rip you off for as much as they can. But you’ll often find that they operate the only planes on a certain route. To get to Graspop, our original option was Stansted to Charleroi but they’ve cancelled that route. Alternatively it was gatwick to Brussels Int – which was around £200 with taxes.
I’m flexible with my airports, but the people who I’m booking for are tight on time as they’ve taken time off work so realistically it has to be Stansted. Which means Ryanair. Phooey.
Hi, I was gonna book the same flights, last year they were so lovely and cheap, the whole thing came to just £20-something pounds return each including all taxes and booking fees and just cost us an additional £10 between us to check luggage in.
This year we’d be looking at about 10 times the price (each). I can’t believe how in one year a so-called budget airline can add on so many extra charges. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were more up front and honest about their prices, but when they advertise at a certain price you expect to get it at that price and not at a price 5 times higher.
It often causes stress and confusion as these prices are often not even shown until you go to checkout, which means weeks or even months of planning relying on the initial price given just fall to pieces.
Laura, you’re absolutely right (and thanks for visiting, by the way). I was under the impression that airlines had to now include all taxes etc in their prices when advertising, but obviously I was wrong. Unless the concession was that they had to add “does not include taxes, fees, surcharges, price rises, discounts, luggage carriage, air, use of stairs, seat, chairman’s bonus and any other damn thing we can think of” on their ads instead.
I was looking at flights from Heathrow to Brussels International which seemed pretty reasonable – around £20 or so. SO I went through the purchase process and ended up with an actual bill in excess of £200…
Hi
Agree
Bunch of thiefs, I had a booking, mate cant make it as wife giving birth! name change charged at £100
Fkin pri**
Sorry
Absolutely no need for apology! This post is about 18 months old, and since then they’ve started charging a quid for you to use the toilet on board. They also ripped off holidaymakers stranded in Tenerife in December when another airline went but (I know – I was one of them, but I flew back with EasyJet and Jet2 instead).
RyanAir = evil. Unfortunately sometimes a necessary one purely as they operate routes for which the alternative is a huge diversion.
Ryanair dumped us in the wrong country. After having us sitting strapped in seatbelts waiting for a take off for 1.5 hour in Stansted, they delivered us to the wrong country – to Spain instead of Portugal. 10 mins before landing the pilot snnounced that for the reasons unknown to him we were unable to land in Faro that evening and would be landing in Malaga instead. ‘But don’t worry’, he said, ‘the coaches are waiting outside’. No coaches outside, of course, not a single Ryanair rep around. After looking for the said coaches for an hour, we found buses upstairs (how insane?) only guessing they were the Faro ones as there weren’t even any signs or English speaking reps. So we were on that bus for over 6 hours travelling through the night through Spain and Portugal, with no airconditioning, drinks, or toilets. Obviously, a day of holiday wasted as had to catch up on a sleepless night. No compensation, not even a response from RyanAir until complaining to the Civil Aviation Authority. And a 2 hour plane journey turned into a 10 hour hell by plane and bus for no good reason – perfect weather, no technical faults. Something that RyanAiar wouldn’t admit is that they took off late and that made them late for Faro airport which has a curfew after 11pm. So, instead of paying a late-landing fine for their own cock-up, they chose to put people through hell to save money. And before anyone screams ‘you get what you pay for’, a flight to a beach holiday in summer couldn’t be that cheap, could it?
An awful story and all to believable. Of course, if you do want to complain to them the only way is through a premium rate phone line – so you’re paying them money to complain to them.
The whole thing is made worse by the “I don’t give a ****” attitude of their pikey chairman. That’s one arsehole who needs slapped in the face. With a chair.