Ryanair: Profiting from your "Cheap Flights"

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Dedication to Ryanair HD

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sourced by Gordon Clark

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  Created by Gordon Clark | add comment

When I first came to Ireland nine years ago, someone from Enterprise Ireland told me that to be called "a cute hoor" was considered high praise in Irish business culture. That may be a forgiving sort of tag for a clever devil who is also a bit of an underdog, as the Irish were in the global economy of the last half of the 20th century. Unless that same cute hoor is prepared to acknowledge his luck however, he begins to value his own deviousness more than his ability to face a challenge and behave honourably.

Thumbing his nose at all the other rule-abiding losers, the cute hoor spoils the game for everybody. This is the arrogant, self-congratulating bully that Ryanair has become, bringing the Irish national airline, Aer Lingus, to its knees in business news this week.

Ryanair knows that we all admire the cute hoor, we all want to take a punt and win. We all want to be deemed as clever as Michael O'Leary is deemed to be. To quote the man himself, "People can complain as much as they want; our flights are full," as if that were the end of all discussion. Yet O'Leary's statement is entirely disingenuous. Rather like when Thierry Henry shrugged off his handball with the remark that he was a player not a referee, you turn that one over and over in your mind thinking of the many ways in which that naive truth is stingingly repugnant.

Ryanair's so-called success is entirely calculated, and not simply the happy result of the travelling public finding perfect value for money. The company is continuously preying on its own customers like a wolf in sheep's clothing, stealthily separating you from more and more of your money even after you have bought your ticket.

Behaving like an unscrupulous loan-shark, Ryanair manages to blur the boundaries between customer and prey. By introducing entirely arbitrary, surprising and peculiar rule-changes on the Ryanair pitch, the company is setting traps for its passengers that ensure that your "cheap flight" is as profitable to them as they can make it.

If you cannot get to a working printer, or if your booking confirmation print-out is lost or stolen, Ryanair will take €40 from you for each boarding pass they print.

If you are a non-EU passenger, failing to get a Ryanair Ticket Sales stamp (of course you can only buy tickets on line, so point me please, somebody to Ryanair Ticket Sales) on the same piece of paper they insist you print yourself will see you turned away at the gate, missing your flight and paying €100 to re-book.

All those taxes you pay for flights you miss? The law requires you be refunded, but of course the company will charge you an administration fee that will disincentivise claims for refunds. So who pockets your tax money?

And prepare for your carry-on bag to meet the eye-ball scrutiny of the staff at the gate, whose job it is to lift a €35 luggage fee at the gate from as many passengers as possible. They do this by walking up and down the queue, calling passengers "you" and pointing you toward a metal "baggage sizer" that practically needs to be greased for your bag to fit through it.

I support Aer Lingus and sympathise with their unions. If Aer Lingus has to be more ruthless with its passengers and labourers to keep the company alive, be sure that Ryanair are more vicious, more ruthless, and more determined to take money for nothing. Let's not let the bully rule the schoolyard, and avoid travelling with Ryanair.