Great shot of Ryanair Boeing 737 on its way to Germany.
Ryanair is probably he best known airline for having crazy ideas for making money. From odd advertisements from talks of charging customer to use the lavatories. This new idea is crazy, since Ryanair use to advertise you could avoid the $15 “check in at the counter” fee by checking in (and printing your boarding pass) online at home. Of course if you decide to go the cheaper route and print your boardingpass at home — don’t lose it. That will be a $60 charge.
A lot of people will always ask “how the heck does Ryanair have such cheap prices?” Well I think it is quite obvious how their fares can stay so low. The European Union has been “working with” Ryanair to make sure they have more truthful advertising and more transparent with their fees.
Even though we might complain about baggage fees going up a few bucks, at least us in the US don’t have to deal with these silly and confusing fees.
Source: Wired Image: Andreasmarx
How big of a shirt do we need to show all the fees we pay too?
There are some pretty crazy fees for airlines now-a-days. From checking a bag, to getting a pillow. But these are some of the weirdest (and some dumbest) ones I have seen.
- Spirit Airlines was charging a $2.50 “natural occurrence interruption fee” to try to re-capture losses from weather. They also had an $8.50 “international service recovery fee” meant to get money for having international destinations. The US DOT gave them a $40,000.00 fine and made them take down the non-advertised fees.
- Allegiant Air charges a “convenience fee” of $13.50 for getting a ticket on their website. Which goes against the industry standard now of charging people to NOT book on the website.
- Ryaair charges about $7 per passenger for a “payment handling fee” no matter how you end up booking the ticket.
- United charges a $349 flat annual fee for frequent flyers (and companion) to fly in the Economy Plus in the front of the plane whenever possible.
- In the CRAZIEST fee I have seriously heard of (have always heard people joke about this), Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary says they are looking to charge for bathroom usage. “Eventually it’s going to happen. It’s just we can’t do it at the moment because we don’t have a mechanism for charging you,” he said. Although, mostly a well-crafted publicity stunt (yes, I know I am guilty of writing about it and furthering their agenda), but it shows that maybe someday, some airline will be silly enough to try this.
Ryanair has decided it doesn’t like having so many people fly on their planes. It must feel that in the great economic airline wonderland everyone is in, it can cancel passenger’s tickets and upset a lot of people.
The airlines has stated it will cancel all booking made through third-party vendor sites (ie lastminute.com, v-tours, tui and Opodo). The airline will give refunds to the websites directly and require the websites to be responsible for getting that money back to the customers.
The airline says that it feels it is unfair that these third party sites charge the customer so much more and it wants to save the customers money. However, it is more likely the airline wants customers to purchase hotels, rental cars, packages, etc through its own website.
Personally I have steered clear of using such third-party sites as Expedia or Orbitz, since most of the time the best deals are found at the actual airline’s website. However, some people only use those third party sites and feel they get a good deal (even if they really don’t), so it seems silly to me that if someone is only going to use the third party sites and if Ryanair doesn’t show up on the results, people will just pick another airline.
Source: Independent.ie Image: F18E777