Pricewatch »

• More annoying Ryanair fees

  May 14, 2009 @ 11:17 am | by Conor Pope

  The actual seats might be cheap but some of the add-on charges associated with flying Ryanair take the biscuit (that’ll be €2). Yesterday it issued a press release announcing that people who book flights from May 20th will have to check in online before arriving at the airport, which is grand.

  Sort of.

  Up until now, folk who used Ryanair’s airport check-in desks were charged €10 while those who checked-in online did not pay anything – presumably because there was little or not costs associated with online check-in. Well, now there is. The tenner charge has been scrapped (Yay!) but has been replaced by a fee of €5 fee per person, per flight irrespective of how they check in.

  And printer’s ink must be at a premium at the low fair airline because it is also introducing a new penalty of €40 for re-issuing boarding cards that has already been printed.

• Flights to the US for a tenner?

  November 2, 2008 @ 9:32 pm | by Conor Pope

  Ryanair is to announce details of its transatlantic flight plans in the morning. Apparently the starting prices for the flights out of Dublin and Stanstead, schedulded to depart from next year, will be a tenner, which, if it turns out to be true, will be absolutely amazing.

• Aer Lingus charge rises by over 60%

  August 22, 2008 @ 9:56 pm | by Conor Pope

  AER LINGUS has increased the handling charges for people booking return fares through its website by over 60 per cent, or €4, since the start of the summer.

  At the beginning of July, tickets booked on the airline’s website incurred a handling fee of €6 per ticket, irrespective of whether the ticket was one-way or return. On July 8th, the company scrapped this flat fee system in favour of a per-journey charge of €4.

  While the change meant that the small number of people booking one-way trips saved €2 on each journey, people who booked return trips were hit with an increase of the same amount.

  The latest price hike, introduced with little or no publicity on August 12th, has seen the airline’s handling fee for a return journey booked using a credit card go from €8 to €10. This means a family of four booking a return journey with the airline would now have to pay €40 in handling fees – compared to €24 six weeks ago.
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• Would you credit it

  July 27, 2008 @ 10:55 pm | by Conor Pope

  The practice certain airlines have of charging people hefty credit card fees comes under the Sunday Times microscope today. As has been mentioned on this blog many times, Ryanair is one such airline. It charges a €5 per flight handling fee when credit cards are used to make bookings. That means someone paying for return flights for themselves and nine of their pals is hit with €100 in handling fees for one single transaction. Ryanair says it is charged a handling fee by banks for every passenger included in a single credit card transaction but, according to Jan Battles, the banks say this is ain’t so. Typically credit card companies charge around 2 per cent of the total cost of a transaction to handle the credit card. So let’s say the you book ten return tickets to London at a cost of €50 a pop. Ryanair will charge you €100 in credit card handling fees – that’s 20 per cent of the total cost of the flights and around ten times what the credit card company will actually charge them.

• Lose the force

  July 14, 2008 @ 11:11 pm | by Conor Pope

  A friend of mine was travelling to Dublin via Heathrow with her two kids yesterday. When checking in, staff, with a straight face, told the children that their plastic light sabres would not be allowed on board the plane because they posed a security risk. While I would quite like to live in a world where light sabres did pose some sort of risk (to bad people, obviously) I’m not so keen on one in which adults with apparently responsible jobs in airports think it is perfectly reasonable to force six-year-olds to dispose of incredibly flimsy plastic swords for reasons which are completely beyond reason.

• ‘Buy your own cup of tea’

  July 11, 2008 @ 11:37 am | by Conor Pope

  . . . or should that be let them eat cake? Speaking on Morning Ireland this morning, Michael Antoinette O’Leary described as “bizarre” the idea that airlines would give delayed passengers the comfort of a cup of tea while they waited to find out what was going on with their flights. Apparently Ryanair passengers don’t deserve it because they only paid €40 for their tickets (not including taxes, charges, baggae fees and “handling charges”, presumeably). Leaving aside common decency and respect for your customers, what about the people who pay a couple of hundred euro for their tickets, Michael? Do they deserve a cup of tea?

• And it’s lashing rain too

  July 9, 2008 @ 5:14 pm | by Conor Pope

  Nightmare in Dublin Airport today. Nearly all flights in and out have been cancelled because of a malfunctioning radar system. I’ve just been speaking to a colleague who was out at the airport and apparently there are a lot of very, very unhappy would-be passengers who’ve been left stranded in hellish sounding clues with little or no information being provided by the affected airlines. Quelle surprise!

• Fair play to BA

  May 30, 2008 @ 11:09 am | by Conor Pope

  I flew with British Airways from Dublin to London recently and it was an absolute joy. Yes, it was a bit more expensive then some of the alternative carriers I could have flown with but it was so much more pleasant, that the extra 40 or 50 quid it cost me per person was well worth it. Seats could be pre-booked without having to pay extra, passengers with young children were boarded first, there was no charge for checked-in bags – and the baggage allowance of 23 kg was a whole lot more generous than you get on many airlines which operate out of this country.

  Staff were all lovely – unfailingly polite, efficient and genuinely friendly – and there was no need to worry in the weeks leading up to departure about what would happen if the flight was delayed or cancelled because, say what you like about BA, they’re never going to completely absolve themselves of their responsibilities to their passengers and leave them stranded in an unfamiliar place or in an information vacuum like some airlines I could name.

  It reminded me of what air travel used to be like.

• Ryanair Vouchers

  May 12, 2008 @ 10:16 am | by Conor Pope

  Paddy Clarke from Dublin got in touch to complain about Ryanair gift vouchers. He received two with a value of €200 each, but his experience in trying to redeem them has left him “very, very frustrated and indeed poorer.” He says there are two phoneline options to redeem vouchers but on the day he tried “and indeed several times since”, the cheaper option, which is chargeable at national rate, “was either not working or on the one occasion it was simply of no assistance as the menu options did not cover gift vouchers, nor indeed did it offer general live operator assistance”.

  So Clarke had to call a premium rate number which costs €1.75 per minute. This number was answered immediately. “Although I had established the relevant flight numbers for my three short holiday flights, the operator persisted in dragging out the call for approximately 30 minutes at a cost to me of €50 plus.” He explains that because the expiry date on the vouchers was the end of this month he was in a “catch- 22 position in that to terminate the call would result in even more expense on a necessary repeat call”.

  Part of the delay was due to the operator requesting a reference number from the gift voucher which unhelpfully was not the printed reference number on the actual voucher. To further complicate matters, “Ryanair chose to convert my two €200 vouchers into eight €50 vouchers, with a consequential phone-time delay in relaying eight alpha/numeric numbers to an already bewildered customer. I presume that this attitude is generated by company policy.” He still has some vouchers left and is dismayed that there appears to be no alternative to using the premium number again. “Ryanair will not accept complaints via e-mail yet will reply in this way, if they choose.”

• Baggage charges just keep climbing

  May 6, 2008 @ 9:22 pm | by Conor Pope

  More bad news today from Aer Lingus. The airline announced that from Thursday its baggage charges will increase by as much as 50 per cent.

• An interesting letter

  @ 1:12 pm | by Conor Pope

  The letter pasted below appeared in The Irish Times this morning. It makes for interesting reading.
  
  Madam, – I read with interest the report of May 1st by Conor Pope on the exorbitant prices being charged by “low-cost” airlines to fly to Bristol and other nearby cities for the Heineken Cup rugby final.

  On January 26th I booked two seats on Ryanair flight FR506 flying to Bristol at 6.50am on May 24 for a price, before taxes and charges, of €49.99. On March 27th I received a schedule change from Ryanair advising that this flight was now departing at 15.00 and that I could avail of a full refund. As this flight would not have arrived in Bristol in time for the start of the Heineken Cup match, I had no alternative but to accept the refund and rebook the flight with Aer Lingus from Birmingham.

  Surprise, surprise, flight FR506 is now departing again at 6.50am with a seat price of €229.99. I would be very interested to hear Mr Peter Sherard’s explanation for this. – Yours, etc,
  TERRI KIERNAN MERLIN, Sarah Curran Avenue, Dublin 16.

• Aer Lingus forced into U-Turn

  April 18, 2008 @ 12:33 pm | by Conor Pope

  Aer Lingus has been forced into an embarrassing climbdown and is to offer economy class seats to all the customers who booked €5 business class flights to the US “in error”. “Following a full investigation of the booking error undertaken yesterday evening by the company, it appears that some customers may have genuinely believed that they were making a booking in economy class,” the company said . It said it was going to contact affected passengers so they could rebook their travel arrangements and described the error as “regrettable”.

  And that’s putting it mildly. Within hours of the sorry tale hitting the headlines at home, news organisations in Sydney, London and New York and dozens of other places in between had picked up the story. Not only that but Aer Lingus also had to endure a lecture in good customer service from Ryanair, of all companies.

  All in all not a good day then.

• Ryanair’s encouragement

  January 23, 2008 @ 2:21 pm | by Conor Pope

  Ryanair increased its baggage and airport check-in charges today and has issued a warning that it will continue to increase them in an effort to “encourage” its passengers to travel with hand luggage only. Baggage charges have gone up from €6 to €9 per bag while check-in fees have increased from €3 to €4. My old friend Peter Sherrard, who has repeatedly – and wrongly – accused me of publishing “baseless” complaints about Ryanair, says the move will help “encourage” passengers to “avoid” the charges by bring hand luggage only and checking-in online, which is free. He said the airline would keep increasing its charges until it has reaches it target of encouraging at least half of its passengers to travel with hand luggage only. How long do you think it’ll take before Aer Lingus follows suit?

• Unfair airlines

  January 8, 2008 @ 9:27 am | by Conor Pope

  Travellers flying with no-frills airlines are still paying more than the advertised price of the ticket, according to a Holiday Which? report published this morning. Despite changes which have forced airlines to include compulsory taxes and charges in their headline prices, budget airlines are devising new ways in which to levy extra charges on passengers, the report found. Holiday Which found Ryanair to be the worst offender while Monarch Airlines, bmibaby and Easyjet all came in for some criticism. “We’re disappointed to see the major budget airlines are introducing charges for services that were once included in the full cost of the ticket. Ryanair’s charge to use its check-in desk is especially unfair. The only way to avoid this is not to check any luggage into the hold,” Lorna Cowan, Editor, Holiday Which? “Although the airlines view these services as optional, who would go on a week’s holiday without checking a bag into the hold?,” she asked.

• ‘A naked attempt to intimidate this office’

  December 7, 2007 @ 5:20 pm | by Conor Pope

  It looks like there’s going to be no let up in the row between the Commission for Aviation Regulation and Ryanair following the nasty exchange between the airline CEO Michael O’Leary and the head of the commission Cathal Guiomard on RTE last night . The pair clashed after the publication of the European Consumer Centre survey which found that Irish airlines were the most-complained-about in Europe.
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• Recycled papers?

  November 19, 2007 @ 5:31 pm | by Conor Pope

  On a recent 9.25am Ryanair flight from Faro to Dublin, a reader says she was charged €2 for a copy of the Irish Independent , 30 cent above its normal retail price of €1.70. She also says the copy of the paper she paid €2 for looked like it had been “recycled copy from the earlier Dublin to Faro flight”. She asks whether it is legal to charge more than the cover price and the short answer is yes. The cover price on newspapers and magazines is no more than a recommended retail price.

  We contacted Ryanair to see whether it was actually charging €2 for the paper and if did “recycle” copies left behind by passengers on the outward journey and sell them to those on the inbound journey. We received the following statement: “Once again this is a baseless complaint. It was made perfectly clear to this passenger before they chose to buy the newspaper that the on-board cost is €2 and they chose to buy it.”

• Fair play to Ryanair

  November 16, 2007 @ 4:20 pm | by Conor Pope

  Ryanair’s 2008 calendar features ladies from from its cabin crew in various states of undress. I haven’t seen it but according to the back page of Business This Week in today’s Irish Times, “some of the snaps are quite steamy”. In April Nicola from Stansted wears little more than a life jacket while cowboy boots are enough for Magda in Charleroi in June. There is also a pic of a Ryanair imagined calendar from Aer Lingus. It stars a frumpy woman of advancing years by the name of Bridget pouring tea. She’s wearing a twee, all-in-one bathing suit decorated in shamrocks. The calendar goes on sale tomorrow on board Ryanair flights. It costs £5/€7 and the proceeds go to Angels Quest, which provides respite care for children with special needs.

• The cheek of them!

  August 24, 2007 @ 11:52 am | by Conor Pope

  Ryanair has announced that it is to make its web check-in free. Hurray you might be forgiven for shouting until you read further down the breathlessly written press release to the bit where they say they are also to introduce charges for people who don’t use the web check-in service. From September 20th, the simple act of presenting yourself at the check-in desk is going to cost you €3. It absolutely beggars belief. If Ryanair could charge you for the air you breath on board their flights they would.

• Who’s worst?

  May 26, 2007 @ 12:44 pm | by Conor Pope

  I was interested to read that Ryanair accounted for 60 per cent of the complaints made by passengers to the Irish aviation regulator last year despite the fact that the airline is responsible fror just 35 per cent of the flights from Irish airports. Complaints are concentrated around flight cancellations and delays, according to the Commission for Aviation Regulation. Aer Lingus, meanwhile, attract more complaints from people denied boarding because of overbooking.

  .

• Real free flights

  May 17, 2007 @ 7:25 am | by Conor Pope

  In excess of 4 million people logged on to the Ryanair website yesterday to take advantage of the company’s offer of free flights. As part of the “sale” the airline has agreed to pay all taxes and airport charges as well, a move which will cost it more than €7m. Apparently the airline’s website had its busiest day yesterday and was brought to its knees a couple of times in the first few hours after the offer went live such was the demand for freebies

  “This is about getting bums on seats. We are paying to get passengers into our planes – we’ll be paying the tax that they would normally have to pay. There’s no point in flying planes empty,” a Ryanair spokesman said. The company is banking on recouping its costs through the sale of add on such as car hire, hotels and in flight food and drink. While consumers clearly liked the move, eco-campaigners were less pleased and called the sale “grossly irresponsible”. “Passengers may be getting a free ride, but the planet certainly isn’t. It is unbelievable that Ryanair is resorting to such tactics,” a Friends of the Earth spokesman said. Friends of the Earth are unlikely to make many friends with the complaint and anyways, if the planes are going to be flying anyways does it make any difference to the planet if they are half empty are full?

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