I love Ryanair — it's like Ayn Rand created an airline. Every flight is a battle of wits between the me, doing my best to _only_ pay the insanely low ticket price, and the airline, attempting to trap me at every turn, using every scumbag trick in the book. The irony is that the people who vilify the company are the same people subsidizing my ticket by refusing to engage in the challenge.
Having said that, due to increased taxes I think the hayday of insanely cheap flights is over. I remember flying London -> Slovenia once for £20 return. The train from the central London to get to the airport? £25.
True — I didn't mean to slight Ayn Rand or her books. But if there ever was an airline where the passenger's success (super-cheap flight versus being horrifically screwed over) is the direct measure of his or her individual skill, effort, and creativity, it's Ryanair.
If anything, I'd say that Southwest has much more in common with Rand's heroes than Ryanair. To stretch this ridiculous comparison further:
Like Southwest, Roark didn't nickel and dime his clients. Rather, he simply pursued his own architectural ideals: simplicity, elegance, form following function -- to hell with everyone else. You can see the same in Southwest. They eliminated the artificial seating charts, standardized the ticket prices, and allowed bags to be checked for free. They simplified logistics, improved the experience, and didn't think twice about bewildering passengers.
Everyone complains about Ryanair, but they still buy the tickets. What the hell do you expect? I fly from Dublin to London every two weeks like clockwork and Ryanair is perfectly fine for the job. All I need is a bus in the sky (I'd actually prefer a train, but nobody's built a tunnel yet).
Why should I subsidize someone else's bag, seating choice, or forgetfulness? Don't think of them as fees, think of them as discounts.
For what it's worth, on the rare occasion that Cityjet (run by Air France) is cheaper I take that, but this is only once every few months. It IS far nicer, with free wine (seconds if you'd like), decent sandwiches, desert chocolates, and a landing at LCY.
Dublin here also. I only fly in to the mainland a couple of times a year and I avoid Ryanair like the plague. If I have to pay €200 more to fly out of Charles De Gaull instead of Beauvais I'll do it every time. No 2 hour bus ride to the airport. No spending an hour and a half standing queueing to check in luggage, then queueing for security, then queueing to board. Then standing around outside learning our plane hasn't been disembarked from yet and queueing again.
Edit: just checked some random dates for CDG/BVA and the price difference on a return flight was < €100.
The yearly cost to me is obviously not remotely near yours, so I think we're both making reasonable decisions here.
That's a really good point - also, Dublin-London is a bit of an outlier because it's from one major airport to another reasonably easy to access airport (Stansted, a 47 minute £12 train ride from Liverpool St.)
If I had to fly from Glasgow to Paris I'd be heading to airports over an hour out of the city on each end of the trip and it would be brutal. As it is, getting to Dublin airport is kind of a pain; I usually take bus 16 or 41 but I wish they would just put a DublinBikes station at the airport.
As a broke college student I flew Paris->Glasgow on RyanAir for €0, only paying the €10 of tax...I was very excited until I spent more money and time riding busses to and from the airports than on the flight itself.
Also, the Beauvais airport (at the time, I don't know if they've expanded) was less an 'airport' and more a doublewide that they parked some planes next to.
I flew Ryan while getting lost between Poland and Portugal... luckily I knew someone there early on that hammered the necessary knowledge into my head about flying with Ryan - their rules... really was a life-saver in terms of price. Now, if something goes wrong with your flight, like due to weather, you are essentially (completely) left hanging, phucked. I love them, I hate them, but I would definitely use them again. What does that say about a company/product??? I dunno.
Everyone complains about Ryanair, but they still buy the tickets.
Because of their terrible customer service, denial of flight on multiple occasions to people I know for trivial reasons, and rip-off terms, I don't travel with them any more, and wouldn't encourage anyone else to either. So no, not everyone still buys the tickets. They are the worst airline I've encountered and I suspect this won't be a good strategy long-term.
More than the terrible customer service, I really dislike the idea of local administration (i.e. unwilling taxpayers) to give them subsidies to operate in certain areas. This is a disturbing way of preventing other competitors to expand in the same way.
What you say is mostly correct, but some stuff Ryanair does seems to be gratuitous pissing off of customers. I only had an issue once, but I hated Ryanair during that flight.
My last appointment before the flight took longer than expected, and then the airport bus came a bit late and was further delayed in traffic, but I still had enough time. But at the airport I discovered I had lost my sunglasses and boarding pass. I tried to reprint the boarding pass at an airport computer (which wasn't free), but I couldn't, because you can't download the boarding pass in the last two hours before the flight, I mean, why can't you? So everything was going wrong, and my bad luck was compounded by the very unreasonable fee for them to print me a boarding pass. That made me a very unhappy customer. I still use them, because in the end I save more, but I have no loyalty to them, even though I am usually very loyal to brands I use regularly.
This highlights that some Ryanair charges are fair (and so you don't subsidise others) and some, such as a reprint free because you can not reprint it yourself, are just plain extortion
> The checking of any bags should be avoided as they slow down loading the plane, inflate the turnover time, and end up costing the airlines more than they are worth.
Are the benefits that significant? After all, boarding times are significantly slowed down by people trying to cram suitcases that ought to be checked into overhead bins. Also, quite a bit of carry-on luggage ends up being checked anyways once the overhead bins fill up. I would love to see some real analysis on this.
The problem with checked luggage first arises if somebody doesn't get onto the plane in time even though their luggage has already been loaded. This essentially means that somebody has to look through all the (already loaded) luggage to remove that specific piece, which, depending on how deeply it's buried, might take considerable amounts of time. This isn't a problem with hold luggage, since there cannot be any hold luggage aboard a plane without a corresponding person.
This isn't a huge problem for Southwest though, as checked baggage for domestic flights do not have to be pulled (and rarely ever are) in the United States. It'll be stored at the final destination printed on the tag until you pick it up, or you file a baggage claim to have it sent back.
Since airlines started to nickle and dime travelers for basic services, like luggage, I've definitely noticed a much more harried and long delay with people getting to their seats and getting situated. I used to remember being able to spend quite a bit of time leisurely reading from a magazine or a book, now I'm constantly getting jostled well after we've started to taxi.
well Wizzair has a simple solution: charge for carry on luggage that is larger than a laptop bag/tiny backpack.
Also consider that usually ground handling is a different company, the airline is paying the stewards wasting time on board anyway, but may have a per-bag price of the check ins.
This may vary by airline, but I believe stewards are generally paid an appallingly low rate (well under minimum wage) for any hours that aren't actually flight hours.
Southwest is not really a "budget" carrier anymore.
They may have started out that way in the 70s when the level of service on traditional mainline carriers was much higher than it is now, but since then, most other carriers have adopted elements of Southwest's business model. Some of the mainline carriers have even gone further (see no free bags, charging for assigned seats, etc).
Especially now that Southwest flies to major airports (DFW, BOS, ATL, the NYC area airports, SFO, etc), I would classify them pretty much the same as the rest of the majors. The only thing they don't do that the majors do is allow their fares to appear on aggregator sites. That, and the free-for-all seating (which I can't stand, but that's a different complaint).
In fact, unless you book far in advance or catch a fare sale, Southwest is amazingly expensive to fly on. A couple of months ago I had to travel on short notice (death in the family, only 3 days until the funeral). An airfare on Southwest from Nashville to Boston was a 56% above the competing mainline carriers. And if I flew into Providence, which would have been more convenient, it was an astounding ~75% higher than Delta or US Airways.
> Although Southwest was once considered a pioneer amongst low-cost carriers, it has remained just that; a dated, bonnet-wearing airline. If Southwest ever hopes to offer it's customers lower rates or increase their profit margin, they are going to have to ditch the sweet tea and start drinking some of Ryanair's killer Kool-Aid.
Last I checked, Southwest doesn't care a whit about Ryanair. They care about competing in the US and here they have the lead.
But it is interesting to note that Southwest's "low-cost" reputation is, at this point, mostly based on memory and advertising, not reality.
Southwest often isn't the lowest fare on a given itinerary anymore, for example, and airports where Southwest is the dominant carrier are also, mostly, those which have seen the largest fare increases over the past decade.
And that's without getting into the fact that Southwest is now experimenting with ancillary-revenue programs through things like buying into Group A, etc.
It depends on the flight... SWA's strength remains low-cost, last-minute fares. SWA doesn't reward you for planning ahead like other airlines does, but they really shine when you're buying less than seven days in advance.
If the flights are still available. I usually end up booking on United (for an SFO -> somewhere east of the Mississippi flight) if I have to do something last-minute, because I can often still get direct or 1-stop flights to my destination, while Southwest will often have only 2-stop+ ones that take 12 hours and cost more.
I find that very often United fares are lower than Southwest anyway. Perhaps it's because SFO is their hub.
Virgin is another surprise - a couple times I've ended up getting SFO -> BOS or SFO -> JFK flights that are cheaper than anything else on Virgin America, even though it's supposedly a "premium" airline. I think they may be offering specials to build up repeat customers on the route, though.
True, they care about local competition. But they also care about growing stockholders' equity, of which one method is improving profitability.
Since RyanAir has shown some prowess in this regard (admittedly through solicitation of subsidies, but also with an aggressive model), Southwest would certainly have some interest. We're talking almost 50% greater net profit on a third of the revenue. Sure that exact comparison is debatable, but the contrast is nonetheless interesting, even if done with a novel approach.
Spirit Airlines has one particular fee which is entirely absurd. In addition to the requisite checked bags fee and carry-on bag fee, you're charged a fee for booking a flight over the phone...or online. Yes, the booking option which involves no actual person, and so is cheapest for the airline, costs money. The only way to avoid the fee is to book your ticket from a live agent at the airport.
Clearly, they do it because booking a flight at the airport is absurdly inconvenient and so few people will do it, rather than as a means of defraying the cost of hiring a customer service agent. But that, combined with their nasty reputation of seeking to extract every last dime from your wallet (someone else mentioned Ryanair as being as if Ayn Rand started an airline company, and Spirit certainly seems like that as well) prevents me from being willing to ever book a flight with them. Even though, counting the fees, they've often been the cheapest option on a flight I've needed, I prefer the second-cheapest airline, which is usually Southwest (unless I don't need to check a bag, in which case United usually wins).
Correct. Both suffer poor customer satisfaction ratings.
Southwest on the other hand has some of the highest satisfaction, and in an ironic twist, actually provides more service than legacy carriers now do -- its prices are comparable, or even higher than legacy but they include 2 free checked bags, no fee for changing flights, free television, free snacks, etc. while legacy carriers have stripped everything down to pay as you go.
Correct. It's kind of disingenuous to call Southwest a "discount" airline. It's very rarely that I can find a Southwest flight for significantly cheaper (or more expensive) than another airline. However, the lack of additional fees above that baseline often makes them a better deal.
Ryanair was heavily influenced by Southwest airlines in the past.
Of course, Michael O'Leary took Southwest's model, and took it way further than the originators did.
"To turn Ryanair into the profit-making machine it is today required strict discipline, together with inspiration from the United States.
In the early 1990s, Ryan sent O'Leary to Texas to find out how Southwest Airlines, an upstart that was taking advantage of aviation deregulation, was making profits with lower fares.
Southwest was one of a new generation of airlines undercutting their established rivals by doing away with the 'frills'. They only served snacks on board instead of full meals, for instance, hence the nickname peanut airlines.
Southwest scheduled its planes and its staff for more flights each day, and it flew to smaller airports where it could negotiate cheaper landing charges. When O'Leary saw how Southwest was making money, it was a "road to Damascus moment," he says, "it was blatantly obvious that this was the way forward.""
Looking at only two options almost inevitably presents a false dichotomy. Ryanair is slightly more profitable, but EasyJet is bigger, offers similarly cheap prices, and while it's no all-inclusive luxury flight, they certainly don't attempt to screw you at every step.
Yep. I will happily fly any budget airline except Ryanair.
Usually once you factor in all the extra costs and inconveniences then they aren't cheaper at all. Plus it makes booking and flying stressful and miserable.
Having flown to Berlin recently via RyanAir and then EasyJet. EasyJet all the way, from the booking to the day of flight, all aspects EasyJet do better and make me less stressed. RyanAir is awful.
Complain about Ryanair all you want, but I flew from Marrakech - Morocco (Africa!) to Stanstead - UK for about £40 (~$65 USD), including 1 checked bag. It was uncomfortable, but I got there.
You can barely even get a train to London from my city (Nottingham) that cheaply.
I think he/she was talking about the train tickets.
Walk-up/on-the-day fares for train tickets in the UK are very expensive.
Picking London to Edinburgh as an example (~400 miles in ~4.5 hours) you'd pay £125 off-peak and £150 peak fare for a train today (there are generally 2 an hour).
Booking in advance (up to ~84 days in advance) you can get those same tickets as cheap as £24 but you're tied to a specific departure time/date (and changing date/time can be expensive).
Oh yeah, of course. I forgot about advance tickets because there weren't any available to get me to Stansted for my flight (needed to arrive by 12pm).
Even now the cheapest tickets from Nottingham to Stansted are £52 sans railcard for the end of January. Maybe Nottingham-Stansted airport is a special case?
Some digging and there are advance tickets to Ely available for £5, and Ely to Stansted airport is £14 for a regular ticket.
> Some digging and there are advance tickets to Ely available for £5, and Ely to Stansted airport is £14 for a regular ticket.
Yes, there are plenty of cases where you can find cheaper tickets by "splitting" the journey. Many can be found with sites like http://www.splityourticket.co.uk/ but not in this particular case, good spot on splitting at Ely.
Ah, that particular case is because there are no advance fares for the train between Ely and Stansted Airport, so most of the train ticket sites don't bother to look for advance fares for any of the legs.
Only problem is that people stop using Ryanair. I've been burned a few times and finally sued them in the small claims court(and won). I've never flown with them since and have quite happily paid more money to avoid. I see this happening for a lot of my friends, and I think the "fuck you" customer service attitude they have is giving way to a much better one as seen by O'Leary's recent comments about wanting to reform their nasty image and "stop unnecessarily pissing people off".
Quote:
Ryanair, Europe’s favourite low fares airline, today (28 Nov) confirmed that from Sunday all Ryanair passengers may now bring a second small carry-on bag (35 x 20 x 20cm) on board, in addition to a free 10kg cabin bag allowance, while its boarding card reissue fee has been cut from €70/£70 to €15/£15 for customers who have already checked-in online.
These latest customer service improvements have been rolled out across the entire Ryanair network and follow the launch of the new Ryanair.com home page, 24 hour grace periods (for minor booking errors), the introduction of quiet flights (pre-8am and post-9pm), with standard airport bag fees to be cut from €60/£60 from 3rd January and fully allocated seating (from 1st February) already in place.
Boarding card reissue fee? It's been a few years since I've been on a Ryanair flight, but all the other airlines I've used recently have QR scanners now, you no longer need a boarding card to board a plane.
Kind of weird viewpoint it is written from. As someone who flies every week, usually Delta and Southwest, I would absolutely love it if Southwest charged lower ticket prices and huge fees to people who bring bags, change their flights, or don't preprint. I'm not the one slowing down the flight with that, so give me the option of a lower price and encourage others to be similarly efficient. Meanwhile the author acts like these are bad things.
Just FYI. Boarding is considerably faster on Southwest for two reasons. One, the well known open seating policy. Two though is that because bags fly free more people check them. This significantly reduces the average time it takes to board and get settled as less people have less bags.
> American cars vs. the rest of the world, American houses vs. the rest of the world
This is entirely due to how cheap land is over here, and it's not even true in a large number of places in the US. Compare New York City to the Midwest, or (especially) the Great Plains.
As someone who flew every week for about 20 years, the idea of not traveling with a bag to be gone for a week or needing to change flights periodically is pretty strange.
I really got burned by Ryanair's miserable 'visa check' stamp policy. After checking in online (mandatory), passing through all of Gatwick security, waiting an hour for the delayed flight at the gate, the attendant simply denied me entry saying he was not qualified to decide if my visa with a clear 3 years before expiry was valid or not and I would have to exit back to the counter and pass back in through security, obviously an impossible 60+ minute process. Oddly departing Berlin, the stamp was provided at the gate.
Back at the counter, the sales attendant tried to offer me a flight to Bremen for five times the cost of the original ticket leaving 8 hours later. When I asked why I would want a flight to Bremen vs my original destination of Berlin, she simply shrugged her shoulders saying it departed sooner...
Needless to say I cannot in good conscience ever give money to this admittedly clever/cunning corporation. Easyjet is not much more and significantly more humane.
I suspect that sometimes Ryanair aren't denying for the stated reasons, but because their plane is overbooked - sometimes they'll come up with any excuse to deflight people, without caring about the effect on customers and travel plans. There must be a reason they're so keen to knock people off some flights.
I think the missing piece of this analysis are the other players in the respective markets. The assumption here is that Southwest can drop elements of their service and still keep the same prices. But competition might dictate if they offered less services than their peer airlines then they would lose customers to those peer airlines. I'm not sure about Europe but perhaps there is no one close in price to Ryanair so there under little competitive pressure to increase what they provide for their price.
People talk about RyanAir from two viewpoints; "they were fine as I knew how to not get ripped off", or "I got ripped off and I'll never use them again".
Look into the safety of RyanAir - pilots scared about how little fuel is onboard, landings with damage have happened too often for comfort etc. and if you're in the first group you would be insane not to become part of the second.
Look into Michael O'Leary and what he's said and done, and then ask yourself if you think he's someone you trust your life with.
I don't, and I'll fly anyone but RyanAir out of the UK. The difference in price is often a few pounds at most, and for me I'd rather cut costs elsewhere.
Ryanair can be viewed as the "extremist" budget-airline. Although this article may propose a great dichotomy, I think it illustrates the direction for lots of low-cost airlines. Ryanair is controversial and has a business model that is being duplicated across the world. Even Southwest created a pledge in 2012 to drastically increase ancillary revenue.
I don't understand how one can vilify things like requiring the customer to print out a boarding pass when the business model in question is to offer the cheapest possible flights.
Ryanair operates to the maximum possible efficiency, and whenever you fail to comply with their procedures you cost the company that efficiency. Something as simple as printing a boarding pass requires printers at the desks, a person or machine to print the pass, and disrupts the process flow. Yes charging ludicrous penalties is profitable, but it certainly deters people from not following the rules.
I would sooner complain about not being able to present my boarding pass as a QR code on my phone screen. That would require some capital investment on part of Ryanair, but would not cost them in efficiency. If my phone dies or I can't open the email, well thats my fault and I probably owe them the 60 pounds (or whatever it is)
Having had the pleasure of working for RyanAir myself I can only say that they run a very efficient operation. Every part of the process is structured for time efficiency (yes, this includes the pre-queue ;-)).
Can't say anything bad about them actually, never had any horrible experiences while flying with and/or for them.
Have had decent experiences with RyanAir to be honest; I think Wizzair is worse - not only this but they have much strayed from the concept of "low cost" that made them famous.
In many situations it is cheaper to just fly with BA, Lufthansa or other European companies.
pure scamming is clearly not a long-term strategy. Hard to argue with current profits but Ryan Air has been in business quite awhile. Perhaps they do know what they are doing.
Having said that, due to increased taxes I think the hayday of insanely cheap flights is over. I remember flying London -> Slovenia once for £20 return. The train from the central London to get to the airport? £25.