"O’Leary accused the travel agent industry of scamming and ripping off unsuspecting consumers by charging extra fees and markups on ticket prices."
That is ... pretty rich.
A couple of years ago I was going to go see my brother in the UK who lived near Stansted. As such Ryanair would have been the most convenient airline. The shere number of dark patterns I encountered trying to book the ticket was such that when I got to the payment page and they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread in the exchange rate I rage quit. I should have known better even then, but now I will only use them if I have literally no other choice. With luck that means "never."
I'm always happy to see the various EU competition authorities pushing back on this kind of thing.
Ryanair used to do some things that were quite remarkably devious - the option to not by travel insurance was in the middle of drop-down list of countries!
To make sure I had remembered that correctly I looked it up and here is a description of it:
https://www.insurancetimes.co.uk/ryanair-to-change-hidden-tr...
NB I've travelled with Ryanair quite a lot and actually don't mind the actual flights but it is wise to manage expectations about the kind of company you are actually dealing with.
I have this example archived. Screenshots and explanation here: https://old.deceptive.design/trick_questions/
Conference video showing this example from 2010: https://youtu.be/zaubGV2OG5U?si=8PkLWhxHFSGQWuWw&t=597
It's not quite as bad as I expected (still bad), since it does at least clearly tell you how to not buy it, in normal size type even. Except then they decided to make it out of place alphabetically (and it seems to have moved at least once, since the other article says it was "between Denmark and Finland" because it was sorted under "don't").
Cool website. It’s a pity it’s no longer a wiki. Perhaps if you used the extension RequestAccount with a restriction of editing to only confirmed users you would be able to keep it a wiki.
Yea quite devious, in a weird way I suppose the dark patterns also serve as an IQ test that favors younger tech-literates who are familiar with web patterns and are also on a budget (though not all).
I used Ryanair a lot while studying abroad in Europe and the €20 flights were real if you jumped through the hoops, which was quite magical.
I once had a flight booked to Paris, but it landed in an airport 2 hours outside of Paris and the train/bus would’ve been 2x the flight cost, so being short of money I just didn’t take the trip and lost €20 :)
The dark patterns favor the patient readers who are able to think through and make informed choices. That wouldn’t be most of the younger tech literates.
Like a bootcamp training.
> However he disagreed that the ‘don’t insure me’ option was hidden, and said that 98% of Ryanair’s passengers could “find a way to decline insurance”.
I'm not surprised, but still a bit impressed by the ability to lie like this. Somehow I doubt even 9% of their passengers would know it was between Denmark and Finland.
Even in that quote 2% of people are possibly scammed out of their money, which is probably tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
It's true you don't know who wants it, but I thought capitalism was supposed to work by mutual consent and transparency of contract. If even one person is deceived, that's a scam! I doubt out of tens or hundreds of thousands of people all of them figured this out and wanted the insurance.
You can use keyboard to navigate a dropdown box by typing initial letters.
I mean yes it is all very deceptive, but I remember being able to buy cheap ryan air tickets just fine with this trick.
I remember when they were seeking approval to provide blow jobs on flights (free in business class iirc.) The only thing that they won’t up charge. They even tried to get approval to charge for bathroom access.
Wild company, but they are entirely on brand.
To be fair, consumers have driven airlines this way. They’ve shown that they’ll buy based almost entirely on price and suffer any amount of agony in exchange.
I just don’t find basic economy or early flights or shitty airlines worth the bad stress.
The advantage of Ryanair and a lot of the other low cost carriers is that they do a lot of point to point flights between regional hubs - for example we flew Edinburgh to Marrakesh with them a few years back which was fine and I think they were the only airline offering direct flights. Going via Heathrow, Gatwick or CDG would have been a nightmare and we were only going for a few days.
I assumed you were making some poorly executed joke, but no!
https://www.smh.com.au/national/ryanair-ceo-talks-free-sex-o...
> He then asked the translator the German word for oral sex. After being told there wasn't one, he remarked "terrible sex life in Germany".
It's not true though, they call it 'blasen'.
Which, of course, isn't true.
I Will always be grateful to Ryanair for having allowed young me to travel cheaply, and I accepted most dark patterns, but I draw the line at the fact they appear to force you to book near seats when traveling with minors, even tho, by law, they have to allocate seats to you like that.
I’ve told people this before as I distinctly remember it being a thing and no one ever believes me!
> they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread
I’m finding this more and more. Uber does it, and even Walgreens does it when I’m in the US and tap my card it suggests that I pay in my home currency. This seems to be a new vector companies have found for ripping off their customers.
What really pisses me off is that this stuff is annoying and sometimes fools us, tech savvy people on a hacker forum. I can't imagine how many elderly/non-techie people are being fleeced out of their money because of these kind of dark patterns.
Yup. Reminds me of how my dad would do his taxes at H&R Block, and then every year take out their “refund anticipation loan” (despite not having some big urgent expense). They deduct their overpriced tax prep fee and a healthy 150%APR interest payment from the proceeds but you get the money same day. You could just not do that and still have your refund in like a week. The APR is unconscionable given they did the taxes — they can be nearly certain your refund will arrive. But they just gloss over those details, probably by saying “Do you want your refund today, or wait on the IRS? With the Today option you can also just deduct your tax prep fee from the refund and not pay out of pocket.” I have a feeling they get a LOT of people with that scam.
Yup
I can never remember which option should I pick. And to be really honest I don't remember if I tried to see if it matched my bank's rate or not
Whenever I travel out of the country I always re-read my credit card policies on foreign currency conversion. Some cards are quite reasonable, some are ripoffs.
In 2025 it's decidedly old-fashioned to even think of interfering with the march of the orphan-crushing profit-maximising machine. Each quarter demands a fresh way to rip off people.
How quaint even the 90s seem today, and we though that was hyper capitalism!
> How old a saying is caveat emptor?
Old enough to learn that it's a sociopathic stance that has no business in a well-functioning society.
You're arguing in favor of what's essentially a scam.
This isn't anything new though. Been like that for the last 15 years at least. Always pay in the local currency (your bank/visa/mastercard will give you a better rate then the merchant)
It seems to be built into the credit card terminals. So it's a visa thing, not on the shop.
I had that with very small shops in non-touristy areas of Mexico where it was absolutely clear to not be a scam attempts by the shops owner. They had no idea what the terminal asked.
I doubt it. One person shops with no relevant contact to foreigners. Maybe the enterprise organising a credit card terminal for them activates it.
I don't think parent is claiming that the shop owner is trying to scam someone. But these prompts have been around for at least 15 years, I'm also sure about that, this isn't new by any measure. And yeah, also came across shop owners who don't know what it is about, and then you have to chose.
Makes sense that shop owners in non-touristy areas haven't seen them before, as you'll only see that when the card has a default currency that differs from the default currency of the terminal.
I just think they genuinely don't know. I was years into travelling before I learned about this 'trick'.
For my part, I'd just always assumed the charge would be ultimately converted by my bank in any case. Seems obvious now I look back, but I honestly just didn't think about the trick.
Just as an example that gives evidence for this, sometimes you'll go to the same place multiple times and the norm is they ask but occasionally someone won't. So it's not a policy.
I presume the people who don't just don't know about it, don't want to bother me and aren't aware it will make a difference.
> Either you were their first foreigner
He could have merely been the first to do the math and bring it up. I could easily see most tourists overlooking this sort of thing, or not mentioning it because they're already accustomed to it.
The visa logo printed on the terminals where this behaviour occurred.
Very true, but the other half is to ensure you don’t use a card with a foreign transaction fee, which will cost you 3-4%. There are free cards like the Amazon Prime Visa that don’t have it, but that fee is very common.
The other thing I hate to see is people using the currency conversion desks at airports, or buying foreign currency from their banks in advance of trips. They give you awful rates.
Assuming you’re traveling to a civilized country, just stick your card in an ATM when you land and pull out the cash you need. Good banks don’t even charge their own ATM fee, so your total cost is the $3-4 that the ATM owner charges, and you get a pretty fair rate.
Yep, IME my bank tried to charge me close to 9% while current exchange was half of that.
> The other thing I hate to see is people using the currency conversion desks at airports
If I've just arrived home with $30 left of whatever currency was used in the place I came from, they could be taking a 30% cut and it would still be worth it to just due it there rather than physically visiting a bank.
That is, if the currency is one they're even willing to exchange.
Careful with random ATMs, some are scamtms.
The physical medium which can be exchanged for goods and services?
> Been like that for the last 15 years at least
Charging significantly more to accept foreign currencies goes back thousands of years.
Almost. To such a degree I would call it a very dark pattern.
There is however one very good argument for. Currencies with very high volatility. Think extreme inflation. If you accept their conversion you know what you pay in your own currency. You have then mitigated a risk. If your own currency is volatile then you might gamble and win. If the foreign currency is volatile you will usually win by paying in the foreign currency. If both are volatile then it is a blind gamble.
The important part here are the settlement dates. Your bank usually do not calculate the exchange rate of the eaxct purchase time.
That is the excuse for the "service". But it is still not wanted and I consider it evil.
When traveling places with rampant inflation you will notice that sellers always negotiate 2 prices. One in the local currency and one in what is considered an easy to use hard currency such as USD or Euros. Forgeries and less cash flowing around has made it harder to use other less know but otherwise hard currencies.
So sellers never care what currency you choose to settle in as very close to zero sellers have multiple accounts on the same terminal. And those who really need it will always negotiate in different currencies.
You might have experienced something like this at times when visiting Argentina or Turkey.
So the "service" is only there for those who want to understand what they pay in their own currency or mitigate a settlement date. And will pay for it!
Local terminal holders rarely care. But the ATM mafias (such as EuroNet) do very much so. Because they actively are playing the mitigation game and are allowed to add fees.
I strongly feel this field should be very heavily regulated. But too much money is involved. And if you look at where VISA and MasterCard are located you will understand that is not a regulation happy corner of the planet.
Ubiquitous currency exchange at the point of sale does not though.
When O'Leary accuses others of "scamming and ripping off unsuspecting consumers", what he really means is that only Ryanair should have the right to scam and rip off Ryanair passengers...
Years ago when paying with PayPal, there were 2 choices - for them to convert currencies or to rely on my bank to convert them. There was a warning that if I chose the second option, it could cost a lot. Turns out, with my bank the conversion was good and with PayPal's conversion I'd lose like 10%.
Stuff like that is what I say "years ago" - I haven't used PayPal for a while now, and I won't use it again.
This disappeared a few months ago for me, unfortunately.
Correct.
Point of sale terminals also do this when travelling - it wasn't especially surprising, just one straw too many.
Of course foreign exchange offices have been doing this scam since forever ("no fees!")...
---
Edit - note that with a bureau d'exchange my objection is not that they charge for the exchange; clearly that is the exact business that they are in. It's the "no fees" etc. marketing that hides from the less astute punters exactly how (and how much) they are paying for the service. I'd like to see that outlawed and direct costs of the exchange up front (e.g. "Exchange £100 for $121.5 at a cost of £10 compared to the base rate")
> direct costs of the exchange up front
Isn't that fairly easy to estimate? If they're showing you a buy rate and a sell rate, you know the interbank rate is going to be pretty much halfway between the two. I don't think anyone's changing money and thinking the bureau isn't profiting.
I beg to differ. All their verbiage about not charging fees is absolutely intended to create that impression in less educated customers.
Honestly, to me the problem seems more like people don’t know they don’t have to use those things. Just pulling money out of an ATM (and yes, declining the currency conversion scam there as well) is a much more efficient and cheap way to acquire the local currency.
People use these desks because they think that’s just “what it costs.”
I see the opposite quote a lot.
Advertised “No Fee” currency conversions, but a HUGE spread built into the conversion rate that comes out to a massive fee.
ATMs all over are like this. Very annoying. I have to decline conversation all the time. The ATM conversation rate is usually 15-25% markup. No thanks, my bank charges nothing, just passes on the Visa 1% fee for fx.
*conversion
Although it is amusing to imagine an ATM that accosts you verbally with smalltalk when you use it.
Surely if the ATM were to taunt you it would use C, or maybe JavaScript.
Great question. Let’s take a deep dive on money. Getting $100 at the right time can be a game-changer! It’s not only a store of value — it’s a means of exchange!
The big scam is some terminals are configured with 17% forex fees (looking at your shady restaurants in Budapest), really funny when it's paired with tips in an EU country.
But this is why Revolut and WISE cards are a god send when travelling, just load them up with the local currency and these issues disappear.
Wise cards are still issued in your home country however. My NZ-issued Wise card still triggers the DCC prompt so it's more or less the same as a NZ-issued card from any other provider. A common misconception but understandable given how Wise markets their card products.
Paying the local currency with your own cards seems simple and works?
Yes, zero Forex fees cards work. But the terminal detects that your home currency is different to the local currency and you still have to choose the right option.
For example, just the other day I fat fingered the screen and chose the wrong currency.
If “your own cards” are with non-neobanks, they tend to offer poor exchange rates, and add commission on top.
This is pretty much everytime in Europe, not sure if the local terminals or the chase chip card always prompts me to pay with 1) USD 2) EURO
Depends where in Europe. I saw it all the time in Spain but never in France.
ATMs do this as well. Always decline the bank doing the conversion.
Do they suggest that you pay in your home currency, or do they give you the choice to select on the ATM? Only once a cashier made a suggestion and it was to warn me of the spread and that generally it'd be better to do it in USD and let my bank do conversion.
You get a prompt on the terminal. I’ve never had a cashier suggest anything to me, and I don’t really want their input. The correct answer is always pay in local currency and let your bank handle it.
I once came across a cashier that thought you had to select the foreign currency option. When I tried to pay in the local currency she cancelled the transaction.
Needed to get another member of staff to explain to her that the local currency option would work fine.
The funny thing is that, at least for American consumers, there’s a good chance you’ll get mildly scammed by using your card in a foreign currency due to a 3%—4% junk fee that is common (I’d estimate 80% of non-premium cards have it). So the discovery of the “let us, the merchant, convert for you” scam has allowed merchants/payment networks to in some cases “steal” the scam from the card issuer (the card issuer then won’t take a fee if it’s in USD, but someone takes a fat margin on the currency). They’re all scumbags, all looking for ways to grift.
It’s been like that when visiting Europe for years now.
I mean American companies have done the "$1000, well that's also £1000 then!" bullshit for ages.
I’m not defending this behaviour with Ryanair, but this is not unique to them at all. It’s an industry “standard”. I’m Irish but live in the UK - when we make card transactions it asks what currency we want to pay in, and hides the exchange rate spread.
> I will only use them if I have literally no other choice
Even with the £20 increase they were likely cheaper than the alternative, if it exists. If this is going to push you into not using them, basically every other airline will be ruled out for you. EasyJet are exactly the same. BA/KLM/Air France/Aer Lingus are all the same on their short hop flights (I’ve actually never flown Lufthansa so I can’t comment on them). The short haul European routes are a race to the bottom.
To be clear, the currency scam was a last straw, not the major dark pattern.
When you compare list prices for flights with them versus almost any other airline you are comparing apples with oranges. The only way to figure out exactly what you'll pay is to go through the entirety of their checkout procedure. My experiences with those other airlines for short haul flights are quite different.
I also hate that it continues through the whole flight. I don't want to find out I have to pay to have my boarding pass printed, or that I need to pay for a glass of water on the plane. The other carrier might be more, but the things that come in the bundled fare make the trip easier with less friction points.
> Even with the £20 increase they were likely cheaper than the alternative, if it exists.
Honestly, on many routes, I think this is true far less often than it used to be.
The one I found most devious was the ATMs in Stansted that offers to pay out Euro. I was going to Spain and knew I would need some cash on arrival, so I thought I could save a bit of time. They had cleverly swapped the exchange rate so in big letters they showed a reasonable figure, like 0.85 and then in smaller type in the corner showed that actually it was in favour of Euros, so you would pay over 350 pounds for 300 euros. I luckily realised in time, but I expect a lot of people don't. Also it's drilled in from the bad old days that you need to take out cash before going on holiday to avoid being scammed. A whole exploitive service industry seems to exist solely on that misconception.
The only place in I've had any troubles paying with card (or easily find a cashmachine) in recent time have been Turkey outside the big cities.
Ryanair was fastest airline when refunding tickets at start of pandemic. Lufthansa just ghosted me.
OTAs were blocked because they just run scam, and Ryanair customer supports had many problems with dealing with them.
Some example from Kiwi:
- if flight gets cancelled and refunded, OTA pockets the refund, does not give anything to custemer
- OTA does not provide customer with email used to make booking. Makes any changes like extra luggage or seat difficult
- If flight gets rescheduled, OTA may not inform customer
- Not possible to add extra child etc...
I would only use OTA like Kiwi when booking flight in very exotic country, and I have no idea how to checkin in chinese.
Wow, not my experience of Ryanair at all! I was only able to get a refund by calling my bank and opening a section 75 dispute.
In fact i find Ryanair booking page the most smooth in user experience out of all major airlines. I am mostly tied to Aegean because i have a top loyalty level, and it is incredibly frustrating to go through extremely slow loading pages, page after page, to do every trivial task, and having to enter SMS OTP on every step. With Ryanair is't one and done, i barely remember it. And every action is blazing fast, pages load in a blink, no spinners.
> coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread in the exchange rate
BoFA does this for international wires as well. And I suspect a lot of companies do this to their international customers too. Unfortunately, it’s become pretty standard
It's easy to book a Ryanair ticket without being upsold. You select the ticket, probably add a bag for about £40, skip the car rental and hotels screens etc, then book. What's the problem?
So you're using Ryanair's own-issued payment card, to avoid the mandatory fees it charges for every other payment option?
You forgot to mention picking the "No I don't need travel insurance" option shoved in the middle of the list of travel insurance prices, which defaults to you buying travel insurance from Ryanair.
Do you already have their spyware app installed and tracking you on your phone, to avoid being charged £50 for a plain boarding pass which you print yourself?
You're describing some other airline's website, surely. If you'd used Ryanair's site you would not be unaware of its fuckery.
You're a few years out of date. You don't get charged extra for using any credit card.
And clicking "I don't need insurance" is easy.
It was there the last time I used Ryanair (which is one time too often IHMO)
They didn't choose to remove those fees - they were legally compelled to: https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-forbids-ryanair-from-char...
Dark patterns are still sketchy and unconscionable, regardless of how easy you find them to get past. They're put there by unscrupulous businesses to catch some people -- can you say no Ryanair customer has ever accidentally purchased Ryanair insurance they didn't need?
Similarly, their latest wheeze, that you skipped over, is to compel people to use their "app". The trading standards regulators need to smack Ryanair about the head with a cricket bat and again force them not to apply such bollocks.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/ryanair...
> Indeed, when I checked in for my 12 November flight to Germany a day ahead, I was told: “Make sure to print and bring your boarding passes to the airport or access them through the Ryanair app” and even “boarding passes must be printed for use”.
> But Ryanair says those are no longer acceptable. Oddly, though, you can use a paper boarding pass that is printed out at the airport by ground staff working for Ryanair – at no charge.
Such utter bollocks. They are totally capable of accepting paper boarding passes (or screenshots or PDFs of boarding passes shown on a phone -- better airlines let you download a PDF from their website once checked in, and you can put it on your phone or print it out; no proprietary app needed), they just want to compel you to install their app and get tracked and dinged and marketed at and upsold up the wazoo with zero benefit to you. It is not necessary at all, and I will continue to never travel with them.
> And clicking "I don't need insurance" is easy.
If you take your time and read carefully. Because sometimes the colored choice is free, and sometimes it is the non-colored one. 100% dark pattern. As is disabling "paste" on check-in, forcing you to remember the 6-alphanumeric char booking code if you do not have a second device/pen&paper at hand.
It's during the "etc" that I start to get pissed off personally. YMMV
(The number of upsells is such that it made a song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id-zzOGnN6A )
Scamming is, sadly, a common practice now for many services. I think the first time I saw it was on Expedia, before the pandemic, when prices started going up at each step.
I still don’t know why all these dark patterns are simply not illegal. What happened to consumer rights? It be a such a widespread practice, I think we will look back at this at one point and will say things akin “how did we let people smoke in planes”. One of those things utterly ridiculous in hindsight
I mean, it does seem relevant that this thread is for an article about them being fined a quarter-billion Euros, so they very much did break the law and the law very much does have teeth.
Right. O'Leary is an antihero at best and a villain at worst.
He's very good at marketing his airline (often with outrage inspiring press releases) and very good at finding ways to squeeze more blood out of the stone of budget travellers. I don't really care whether he's "good" or "bad" but I would like to see the regulators shut down more of these aggressive tactics as they emerge.
Bezos invented 'your margin is my opportunity' (at least that's where I heard it first), but O'Leary has that phrase in his blood instead of hemoglobin.
I just wish the airlines were forced to put their booking behind an API so we could book flights without having to go through mazes that are different for every airline.
Talk to your travel agent. They will book you on sabre and bobs your uncle.
Ryanair does lots of shitty things, but I dont see why an airline should be forced to resell to shitty agencies taking a an unecessary cut instead of consumers buying directly with the Airline.
I actually wonder how much traffic they lose this way. My employer doesn't allow me to book with them because the agent doesn't list them. Even though I want to go to Cambridge, quite annoying.
If your job is paying, why do you complain?
Late reply: because noone else flys to Stansted directly at that time. And via Heathrow is another 2h extra.
I try to spend the company’s money with as much care as I spend my own.
I have found myself to be the only person in many conversations defending Ryanair. People complain about legroom, everything being a paid add-ons, you name it. The key is to treat it like a bus that takes you from A to B, sometimes cheaper than a bus, not some sort of luxury experience. The times when flying was luxury is over. And I benefitted from it greatly as a student, so have many shown by Ryanair's passenger numbers.
And I am also always confused about the non-transparency that people mention about their fees. When you do the checkout, you select the services you want and pay for those. There used to be a time when other airlines would have a lot of things included in the basic ticket price, but that's not the case anymore, so it's not different. And I think this was an inevitable in an industry with small profit margins where price differentiation would bring gains.
Either you got used to their evolved dark patterns or you haven't booked with them recently.
I was also Pro-Ryanair: they allowed to see friends and family across Europe with a student budget.
Now, it's an 8-step booking process where you try to figure out what is actually optional and avoidable and what's included in the advertised fare. Depending on the airport, they threaten to charge you if you don't print your boarding pass beforehand. Depending on the flight, they become pretty aggressive in weighing your carry on, mainly to try to catch you out and make an extra 50 euro.
The company went from no frills budget airline to antagonistic and aggro where literally anything is cranked up to 11 to extract value from you.
I used it once since COVID, last year, didn't seem too bad.
Given the mood in the thread, I do indeed think that I may have a high tolerance for such practices and pay careful attention to fine prints. After all, I had all the training while applying for numerous Schengen and other visas, immigration paperwork. After those, dealing with Ryanair that faces at least some competition and scrutiny is not that bad.
A bus is generally a far more pleasant experience. When taking bus you are not herded like cattle into pens based on priority queue status. When a bus has technical issue, they don't hold you hostage on-board for hours to avoid paying compensation. in Europe, a long-distance bus has the comfort of a business class airplane seat.
Just the fact that people can’t talk on the phone whilst on a plane makes it infinitely better than a bus.
Starlink on flights could put an end to this
hooray for technology!
Multiple lifetimes of thousands of the most brilliant engineers collaborating, sharing algorithms, protocols, mining, smelting, developing tooling to create tiny rocks that can think and blasting them to hover over the earth just so we can slightly annoy the person next to us with a conversation about the weird stuff growing between our toes.
From a technical standpoint, the ability to make VoIP phone calls from planes exists right now, at least on planes with newer and better internet connections. It hasn't been enabled because of ferocious customer opposition every time the idea is proposed. Which, frankly, is just fine with me. People can still send emails and messages from in-flight Wi-Fi, no need to subject everyone else to your phone calls.
Quite curious, which route was this on?
Not one time have I had a consistent internet connection whilst flying transatlantic on Delta, KLM or BA airplanes, to the point that I regretted having paid for it every single time.
Phones in seats have been a thing for decades, WiFi has been a thing for 10-15 years.
Do you not own a pair of headphones?
You can reimburse your costs of unplanned overnight stay, even when it happened because of weather. So those AirBnBs were also free. Even the taxi to and from there. Ryanair was unlawful if they hadn’t given this information.
Btw, there are power banks and headphones which can easily handle 2 days.
Especially that it’s completely normal to talk with each other on planes.
The infrastructure for air travel requires all that for safe travel
As a pilot myself I know why all the holds exist and while not perfect, the majority of complaints aren’t random bullshit they are flight safety issues
The fact that people demand luxury because it went from veblen good to commodity is the problem
Different airlines have different policies. e.g. others you don't get stuck waiting on the plane because they don't load passengers while a mechanic is still working on the avionics.
Do you love that bus so much that you want to sit in it for 30 hours?
To me, their general attitude and invasiveness is what puts me off.
https://noyb.eu/en/want-book-ryanair-flight-prepare-face-sca...
My one and only experience with Ryanair was that they were rude and hostile even in places where they weren't trying to fleece you. From in-your face rude signs (official, corporate designed ones, not something printed from Word by a random employee), to a UI where you needed to concatenate strings in order to craft a valid input (something like "enter your credit card number, followed by #, followed by the MMYY validity date"). Maybe that was to make people fail checkin and force them to pay for checkin at the counter, but I think it was early in the booking flow, i.e. where they had no incentive to make it hard.
When was this? I have zero recollection of ever doing credit card number formatting anywhere.
Over 15 years ago, I think, and I have no idea if it was credit card numbers or something else. It was sufficiently crazy UX to stand out as crazy for a consumer-oriented website even in the much less polished web back then.
Yes, this sounds made-up/not Ryanair. I've used them for over a decade, paid with many different cards and have never encountered this with them (nor anywhere ever really).
He didn't mean it literally. Read the comment more carefully.
> And I am also always confused about the non-transparency that people mention about their fees. When you do the checkout, you select the services you want and pay for those.
The lack of transparency is that it's hard to price compare. Your will almost never pay the ticker price at Ryanair, but at others you might.
I don't follow, I never paid more than ticker price?
The issue is sometimes I want to compare flying with x with bags and flexible fares. These days I have to click++++ multiple times to get to the stage when I can add bags, flexibility, etc to the ticket and then repeat with each alriline I want to compare. In the old days this was the price shown upfront -- nowdays it's hidden behind several layers. Not just Ryanair but many airlines do this.
I do appreciate tho it's a bit of a trade off. These days many airline offer choice so if you don't need the extras you do save some money. But the tradeoff is if you do need those extras it's now more expensive and less transparently priced.
Flying in the pre “no frills” days was far more expensive. This was good from an environmental point of view but bad from allowing mass transport
Ryanair weren't just a bystander in this race to the bottom, they were primary drivers of creating it, along with Easyjet, undercutting competition and forcing everyone else to become a low cost carrier.
They're a total success commercially you can't deny it, but my god what a horrible experience for everyone involved, passengers and staff alike
I disliked them a bit, but then they stopped flying to a certain destination. I quickly realized that the other airlines were 3x more expensive. I realized I actually cared about price much more than any possible extra leg room or other perks, and that their super cheap flights are quality by itself.
Like the comment you are replying to said - if you don’t want super cheap prices and super cheap service, fly with a more expensive carrier. Qantas, emirates, etc etc.
You get what you pay for .
Legacy carriers run a hub-and-spoke model. Ryanair specialises in direct flights. If I can choose between a direct flight with Ryanair, or a connecting flight with a legacy airline, I'm going to choose the former to limit time spent in airports.
You can get point-to-point connections with legacy airlines all over Europe (the hub and spoke model means you can also get onward connections including to non-European destinations). Might not be exactly the same airport pair (and there are sometimes good reasons to prefer the second tier airport Ryanair flies too rather than the main city airport), but there aren't many city pairs you're forced to use Ryanair or a connection, provided you're happy paying more money and flying at a different time.
But yeah, you're not going to be flying Qantas or Emirates, you're going to be flying BA or Aer Lingus or Air France or even another LCC
With the expensive carriers, you nowadays get super cheap service but not the price...
Firstly Ryanair don't fly the routes Qantas and Emirates do, so you have no idea what you're on about comparing them
Second, Ryanair et al have dragged all the previous decent airlines down with them into the gutter and even paying more doesn't really get you service of years gone by. The only way they could compete was by slashing costs and prices to appear near the same ranking in the search results. You don't really get what you pay for flying short haul in Europe. Even business is mostly "low cost economy plus" rather than true business class in Europe
I mean if you really have money there are companies that can get you on a private jet. No customs, no luggage check in, no Heathrow/JFK.
>Second, Ryanair et al have dragged all the previous decent airlines down with them into the gutter
Ryanair didn't drag anyone into the gutter. Buyers preferring to spend less did that, which could be for a variety of reasons, one of them being increased wealth gaps in society.
Within Europe, I'm usually not in a big hurry or tight on budget within reason. But I understand that many are and it encourages race to the bottom budget airlines. Personally, I mostly do train within Europe even when it involves an overnight sleeper where they exist.
I see you're doing Reddit level discourse. I'm out
You can just pay more to have the old experience. Economy plus is what you used to get 20 years ago, and business is way more affordable than it used to be.
I’d rather have a cheap flight and spend my money at my destination though.
> The times when flying was luxury is over.
No, the times are now. You just have to pay.
You are misreading it. It’s not luxury any more (many people can afford it) but of course you can pay for a luxury experience if you want / can.
It is something odd about their branding or something, because people's perceptions do not match the reality. Somehow everyone knows Temu is going to be highly likely to sell you very cheap stuff, and it's ok because the expectations are managed. Lots of people still expect Ryanair to not be a cheap airline. I don't get it.
Your devils advocate position appears to be in direct opposition to multiple court rulings that forced RyanAir to acknowledge and remove dark patterns. And thus, may not be an opinion that others share for pretty obvious reasons?
I will always fly Ryanair ahead of other low cost carriers in Europe as unlike easyJet for example they don't overbook. The most painful experience I've had was to arrive at an airport with a young family and get all the way to the easyJet flight gate to be told the flight is overbooked. And unlike the US where this starts an auction it's basically tough luck. Should be outright fraud in my opinion.
Interesting, are you at least entitled to rule 261 compensation?
I honestly don't know would I be able to keep it together if something like that happened to me and my family. Definitely should be fraud and compensated VERY HEAVILY if it happens to someone due to a technical glitch or something similar.
This is an odd story. Ryanair doesn't pay commission, so these resellers make money by charging extra fees to unsuspecting customers. I don't know why Ryanair wants to stamp out this practice (which doesn't cost them anything and brings extra sales), but I don't see why they should be prevented from stamping it out.
Ryanair (and to an extent other LCCs) generally doesn't like ticket sales through resellers because a substantial part of its profit margin comes from upsell of add-ons and partner services during the booking/reservation process
Thanks, that makes sense.
Why isn't Ryanair allowed to prohibit use of their website by resellers?
> Why isn't Ryanair allowed to prohibit use of their website by resellers?
To give a more general answer than the sibling comment, setting conditions on how a product may be used usually distorts the market, harms buyers, and reduces competition, naturally to the benefit of the one setting the conditions.
For example selling cars that you're not allowed to use for "professional" use, only personal (as Nvidia does with forbidding datacenter use of some of its GPUs, charging extra for it). There was also a self-driving company that forbade buyers from using their cars to create a taxi service, essentially reserving that market for themselves. It may have been Tesla, but I can't find the story right now. In general living in a world where we need manufacturer's permission to do anything is less than ideal.
In this case I'm sure Ryanair would like to spin it as resellers upcharging customers, but by complete coincidence, their practices also prevent someone knowledgeable in all their dark patterns from protecting customers from them by acting as an intermediary.
It's a restraint of trade issue. You're not allowed to restrain other's people's ability to run a business or earn an income, beyond some reasonable cases.
Like running the only gas station in town and then refusing to sell fuel to a competitor who is trying to build a gas station that wants to compete with you.
That is not analogous, as online travel agencies are just middlemen. I am not aware of a law anywhere requiring a seller to have to deal with middlemen.
I guess because travel agencies need to be able to show customers the most economical flights? By prohibiting agencies on their website, they can not give consumers (through their agents) the ability to compare different choices.
Customer support would be a nightmare - who's responsible? Communication? Refunds? Scams? Dodgy middle men?
RyanAir would get all the negatives from an unhappy customer and restricted ways to fix it.
Any issues at all and it wouldn't take much to make a sale unprofitable.
There's also the issue that you're making apples-to-pears comparison if Ryanair shows up in results. While Air France and British Airways have largely equivalent products, Ryanair's is...different.
If you had ever purchased a RyanAir ticket you would understand. You get up charged for everything and have to deselect all the up charges at multiple screens. It is their operating model to sell basically free seats, and profit on upsells. Third parties eliminate a large portion of their upsell pipeline.
Ryanair is cheap, they charge extra for everything. But the tradeoff is you get where you are going for cheap if you avoid all the extras, including bottled water.
The funny part is how most OTAs are pretty awful with addons themselves. I know for a fact that certain OTAs will sell tickets at a loss hoping you trip up on one of their checkboxes, like the 15€ automatic checkin service many offer.
I just now booked a ticket on gotogate, paid 80 euro and received a receipt from ITA airways for 120 euro. They apparently lost 40 euro on this sale, I only had to click "no" on about 18 questions.
Go To Gate are on my ban list personally for awful behaviour when a flight was cancelled.
I feel that a lot of OTAs will just not refund you when a flight is cancelled, especially if it's not one of the more reputable ones. Is that what happened here? How did you fix it?
In my case in 2020 I had to request my refund via PayPal for Vayama
Most airports have water fountains, even in Europe where they're not as common.
Whenever I fly, I always take an empty water bottle through security and then fill it in the secure zone.
They can be hard to find! It took me about 15 minutes of searching in PMI one time recently…
> You get up charged for everything
No you don't. You can:
> deselect all the up charges
> Third parties eliminate a large portion of their upsell pipeline.
This is nonsense. Third parties cannot provide extra luggage space, priority boarding etc.
A large part of the pipeline consists of insurance, rental cars, hotels, etc.
I'd bet that's the smaller part not least because customers know there they have a choice.
> so these resellers make money by charging extra fees to unsuspecting customers
I don't think thats correct, people who use travel agents do so because they like the service or are unable to book for themselves, it's not wrong to offer a service and be paid for it and there isn't any broad evidence that travel agents misrepresent anything.
Customers aren't unsuspecting. They are happy to pay the markup of OTAs to not have to deal with all the booking processes themselves.
Ryanair are idiots to not accept free sales.
The OTAs are idiots for wanting to sell Ryanair flights without gaining a commission.
And the biggest idiots are the Italian court who sticks their filthy fingers in this whole business.
Just before Covid when everything was cancelled I booked some tickets through Kiwi and it was the worst decision - I spent year (!) getting my money back. I'm not saying Ryanair is a good company, but for their flight (i.e. one of those which I booked through Kiwi) they reimbursed me immediately. The second flight was EasyJet and they said they already sent the refund to Kiwi, while Kiwi said they got nothing. In the end it was Kiwi who sent me the rest, and in my view they truly are parasites (they also got a Covid loan from the Czech government). Maybe in the days of Skypicker when their search engine was good they provided some value, but nowadays I advise everyone to avoid them.
I booked direct on Ryanair.com and they refused to refund our tickets because the flight technically ran even though we weren’t legally allowed to leave our homes. Lesson learned, I’ve got travel insurance now
Have you tried a credit card charge back?
Did it on debit card, another lesson learned.
Yes, after the flurry of Covid cancellations I avoid using OTAs. Where we had flights booked direct with the airlines getting our money back was much swifter than where we had gone through an intermediary. Also EU bookings were much quicker to refund than US ones.
Compare and contrast with: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46364852
What's there to contrast? It's basically the same experience as I had.
Had a very similar experience with eDreams. Absolute scammers, in hindsight it was foolish to trust an unnecessary middleman.
It is of course ironic since we're talking about Ryanair here but I'm genuinely curious as to why it's abusive to determine that your product/service must be sold via your platform?
Legitimately welcoming discussion here as I'm keen to hear the other side.
Yeah, generally speaking the last thing I want to do is to defend RyanAir but I don't see how what they're doing here is wrong.
I see no way in which this is abusing a "dominant" market position. If you only want to sell tickets via your own site, what on earth could be wrong with that?
Indeed.
Ryanair wins ‘screenscraping’ case against Lastminute in France
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2022/05/25/ryanair-wins-...
Good! If you are wondering what this looks like in practice, I booked 3 flights this year with Ryanair and EVERY single time my tickets (directly purchased from their site) were flagged as "made through a third-party travel agent".
The "verification" workflow is super obtrusive: either pay them to use facial recognition technology or do slower verification (which I assume would be too slow if you saw this last minute). If you missed the email, you'd end up having to pay 55 eur to fix the issue. I was able to complain to customer service but it was definitely incredibly user hostile, intrusive and just ridiculous given that I booked directly via their site.
> Dear AAA this booking, AABBCC, appears to have been made through a third-party travel agent who has no commercial relationship with Ryanair to sell our flights. Therefore, Ryanair has blocked this booking.
> As third-party travel agents often do not provide Ryanair with the correct passenger email address and payment details, we need to verify a passenger's identity before they can manage their booking and check-in online.
> Ryanair needs to carry out this verification process in order to ensure we can comply with safety and security requirements.
> Once a passenger on the bookings has completed Ryanair's verification process, we will provide full access to the booking, including to the ability to make changes to the booking, add additional services, and complete online check-in.
> Express Verification is available at a cost of EUR 0.59c per booking.
> This fee covers the cost of the verification. Ryanair does not benefit commercially from this. There is no charge for Standard Verification.
> Passengers who do not avail of online verification (Express Verification or Standard Verification) to verify their bookings can verify at the Ryanair ticket desk in the airport, however they will be charged an airport check-in fee of up to €/£55.
Ryanair.com tickets were flagged as such? I can't believe this, have used the website in the past two years 10 or so times, never had this.
I don't understand this hate on Ryanair. Just treat it for what it is, a super cheap airline if you avoid all the upsells. No one is being forced do fly with them.
I don't fly with them, and likely never will, simply because a coworker once showed me their checkout flow (back in 2011) and I found the amount of dark patterns to try and get you to accidentally spend more than you meant so disgusting I swore I'd never do business with them.
Being cheap is one thing, trying every trick in the book to try and make money the customer didn't mean to spend is another thing altogether as far as I'm concerned. That is worthy of hate.
This is the true advantage of a competitive marketplace, your parent commenter votes yes to dark patterns where the person who can dodge them wins, and you vote for honest, open checkouts for a higher price. Luckily, you two don't have to agree and as long as there enough of you, both will coexist.
Imagine if you had to agree and compromise on a single airline?
> This is the true advantage of a competitive marketplace
No thanks.
There can be a world where we don't let companies behave in the most abject ways possible.
> Imagine if you had to agree and compromise on a single airline?
This is literally a "the bar is in hell" take.
No, I think your "true advantage of a competitive marketplace" is the kind of "invisible hand of the free market" stuff I don't care for.
But you know this in advance! Try booking with Swiss, you also get a ton of upsell on insurance, car rental and what not. Then you sit in their business class seat and get an advert screened infront of you that you cannot skip. That makes me angry, not Ryanair.
Me hating Ryanair in no way implies I have net positive feelings about other airlines.
> No one is being forced do fly with them
Sometimes they are the only option :-/
Did they eliminate the competition because people chose them over the other providers, or are they the only option because no other airline chose to offer that flight segment?
It’s not that simple. I’ve seen several routes where ultra low cost carriers simply lost against normal airlines. Especially when there are multiple airports in a given city, they often loose at usable airports. For example in Brussels.
Sometimes you ARE forced to fly with them. Some airports have contracts with them etc etc
It is a ridiculous claim. It is always a choice, you are not really forced to fly in any case. If you do want to fly, or have a very strong reason to, there are other means of transports, or flying to different airpots if you really want to avoid Ryanair.
I've traveled all over Europe; Ryanair and other low cost European carriers were never on my list.
Well, theirs scammy sales interface is similar to GoDaddy. But I had never problems flying Ryanair.
For flight hacks wiht Ryanair, try kiwi.com As far as I understand they also cover the financial risk should there be a problem with the connection.
> As far as I understand they also cover the financial risk should there be a problem with the connection.
You have to pay for the service, though, and if you’re already flying Ryan Air, cost is probably a factor.
The service used to be free, and while it was a bit frustrating to go through it, it did save me once. On the other hand I have a friend who, upon me telling my positive story with Kiwi support, told me her negative one. So your mileage may vary.
It’s still a good first site to check to get a general idea of what’s available where, though.
"It’s still a good first site to check to get a general idea of what’s available where, though."
Depending on what you are looking for, Wiki Airport pages and this can be good: https://www.flightconnections.com/
But then we are talking about serious travelers and airports, where flights are scare.... ;-)
I wasn’t familiar with that one, will check it out. Thank you.
Ryanair heavily advertises on their site that their tickets are refundable
It turns out, they aren’t - there is a ton of fine print and if you happen to qualify they “refund” you in miles
Both in the US and Europe, it’d be great if the government used some of their overreaching powers they use to pass laws to spy on us to also pass laws to protect us as consumers for products and services across the board
It would be a decent consolation prize
Sort of off topic here but lack of consumer protection AND shitty airlines across the world are both subjects that really trigger me (not really)
It's just a cat and mouse game. Some intern comes up with a brilliant way to shaft people, a VP takes that idea and forces devs to work overtime on it, it generates a lot of revenue (and fat bonus for the VP), then the lawyers on both sides to get to spend a lot of time slowly arguing with each other while taking money from the company and taxpayers. By the time it gets to this point, the company already has five other schemes in the works.
When you fly you feel like you're playing Russian roulette, many times over. The flying experience is trash. RyanAir may be the worst, but just by a little. At least they fly on time and they seem to know what they're doing. Then in the Netherlands you pay 30€ in airport tax for a 39€ ticket. Yet they fine RyanAir, not themselves ;)
At least it's a wonderfully round number :)
Ryanair would charge for air if they could.
They'll contest it and won't pay it. Post again when they actually transfer the money lol
What's going on on this thread? why are so many people defending Ryanair? I understand it's cheap and you get what you pay for but to defend this race to the bottom and scammy UX is so weird. Why do we need to simp for companies like this? It's great to have cheap options but we can also expect more from life. I'm sure we all here know how to navigate the dark patterns on the website but millions of people don't, so we just don't care anymore? Do we just shrug and go "as long as I get a cheap flight"?
Yes, especially for a short flight I do not have high expectations. I don't want to be charged an extra $10 so I can get a "free" half sized water bottle or tea hat's been brewing since the late 90s. I don't need extra baggage, legroom, or any of the other add-ons that other airlines try to provide and charge for.
I don't love the dark patterns, but believe the CEO when he says they are basically traps that enable the low prices for the people that don't fall for them.
> I don't love the dark patterns, but believe the CEO when he says they are basically traps that enable the low prices for the people that don't fall for them.
I don't know what to respond to this. Are you saying you're fine with other people falling for the dark patterns if that allows for a cheaper ticket for you?
Yes, they've always had a model of "people in the know" being subsidized by others.
Didn't pre-print out your ticket? 100 euro fine. Your bag is too large at the gate? Same thing.
It's the airline of Compound Interest- "He who understands it, earns it... he who doesn't... pays it"
An airline that isn't purely catered to the rich, but to those who are intelligent, knowledgeable, and don't mind the lack of frills. It's like an airline crafted for grad students.
I guess we'll have to wait till it's your parents they screw over.
Flying is not the safest thing you could choose to do for a couple hours
This like two scam artists fighting over the right to rip off people.
Why are OTAs entitled to sell Ryanair tickets in the first place?
Hmm the guardian has gone "accept tracking or subscribe".
I wonder how that works out for them.
I also wonder if the time is ripe for some company to disrupt advertising by simply doing what google did on launch in 2000.
I didn’t know you were allowed to do that with cookies.
UK site. Not in the EU any more.
They're doing business in the EU.
Amusingly my voluntary subscription was just under the cut-off amount and I cancelled it as soon as this came in. I bought a subscription to The Economist instead.
Reminds me of when a newspaper I subscribed to went from no-paywall to a soft paywall.
When I called to cancel and gave my reason as the paywall, they were very confused, but I knew what I was doing.
Did they really already get rid of all the laws EU enforced upon them before they left? One would think it'd take a decade at least, but I guess things can move fast when the government really wants to.
The way regulation works in the EU is typically EU comes up with regulation for countries to implement, then they implement the laws via their national system, then everything is handled "locally". So just leaving the EU doesn't mean that all of those things just stop being active, you need to go through the process of removing the local laws before.
Well, I think Meta was the first to give it a try, and given that they had to revise it to not be like that (these changes incoming in January it seems https://www.euractiv.com/news/meta-to-tweak-its-pay-or-conse...), it seems to not be much of a gray area anymore, otherwise Facebook would continue offering that choice to users.
> The social media giant was fined €200 million in April for breaching the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) over the binary choice it gives EU users to either pay to access ad-free versions of the platforms or agree to being tracked and profiled for Meta’s ads.
> In a press statement, the Commission said the revised offer would give users an “effective choice” between consenting to their personal data being used to show them fully personalised ads or handing over less personal data and seeing “more limited personalised advertising”.
Seems like there will be a more nuanced choice available in January, than "pay us or we'll track you"
They did not. The rules are still basically the same just from a practicality point of view.
> ... or no one bothers to enforce them any more?
I know it happens in other countries, but can you actually get away with this in a civilized and non-authoritarian country today? Eventually you're gonna have to do/say something about it, if people keep opening up new cases about it.
Why wouldn't they be allowed to do it?
You have the choice of not viewing the website.
That's non-compliant with GDPR. When shown to EU readers, they cannot block access based on accepting a privacy policy. Only essential cookies that really are needed for it to function are required.
This was 1.5 years ago; at this point they are functionally allowing it.
There's been some GDPR-related rulings in EU courts which seem to be allowing this kind of thing at least by some interpretations.
Why not €512M?
"Dear passengers, please have your credit card ready for the landing."
New "we got fined" fee
TLDR
"Ryanair’s tactics included rolling out facial recognition procedures for people who bought tickets via a third party, claiming that was necessary for security. It then “totally or intermittently blocked booking attempts by travel agencies”, including by blocking payment methods and mass-deleting accounts. The airline then “imposed partnership agreements” on agencies which banned sales of Ryanair flights in combinations with other carriers, and blocked bookings to force them to sign up. Only in April this year did it allow agencies’ websites to link up with its own services, allowing effective competition. The competition authority said Ryanair’s actions had “blocked, hindered or made such purchases more difficult and/or economically or technically burdensome when combined with flights operated by other carriers and/or other tourism and insurance services”.
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And who cleans up the mess when OTAs miss emails, get passenger details wrong, display outdated prices or add markup through algorithmic pricing? Ludicrously one sided take.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an airline take responsibility for a TA’s mistakes. Usually they just send you back to wherever you bought the ticket. And there are other ways to influence the quality of how aggregators and travel agencies operate, instead of just bluntly trying to block or restrict them.
Is there any way to report AI slop accounts on HN? This entire account is generic AI slop comments.
I agree. Report it via email hn@ycombinator.com to @dang.
You guys don't have any other problems than looking for AI slops in every message on HN?
Why do you think I am an AI slop? If you don't like my opinion , it doesn't mean I am AI.
The issue is not about liking your opinion. It's about use of AI to produce an opinion.
Don't tell it.