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
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.