Ryanair

God I hate them.

Part of me wants to leave this post there but I feel I should give some sort of motive. So here's an example of why a part of me hopes that their offices burn to the ground and all the wings fall off their planes, possibly plucked by some righteous, loner, school boy, god plucking wings off flies.

Last night we were booking tickets for a family holiday to Spain. The flights aren't really that cheap anyway and then you come to all the additional costs:

Quite annoying - £20 to take up to 15kg of luggage (and woe-betide you if you take more). Luggage, what exatly is in their hold otherwise? I mean, they have bought standard model planes, which presumably have exactly the same hold capacity as every other airlines planes. I can only assume that their holds are somewhat empty because everyone flying with them is wearing as much clothing as possible with as big a piece of handluggage as possible, trying to squeeze into hot, tiny seats.

Also annoying is the card handling fee - £20. £5 per passanger, per flight (two people on returns). I am still only going to be paying once, and presumably they're not going to re-run the transaction at every check-in to take my money gradually. The only card on their list which wouldn't attract a fee is the Ryanair Creditcard, although I wouldn't be surprised if it charged you both to pay for things with it and to then repay it, after all having computers that can run electronic transactions does cost money and is a luxury that more frugal card holders can manage without.

Most annoying however is the £20 charge for online check in. Again, £5 per passanger per flight. This is charging me to save Ryanair money because now they won't need to have a lady waiting to view my passport, and take my bag. Although wait, you will because I'm taking a bag. Maybe that was what the bag charge was for. Anyway, in notes to the side of this is the following warning: If you don't check in online (and print out your bording cards) they will charge you £40 per passanger per flight to provide you with bording cards. Surely part of the cost of a flight should include the right to actually get on the flight? The thing here is that if the flights had just cost more and there had been the option either to pay more for non-online check-in or the option to save by taking online check-in then I wouldn't be annoyed.

Rant rant rant rant rant.

Anyway, basically I find their whole philosophy of getting you to pay extra for every tiny item you want in addition to just having a plane with fuel and a pilot just so that they can claim low prices is wrong. Especially with costs that aren't actually optional and don't appear to bear any resemblance to the actual cost involved. This is a style of business that I don't want to succeed, There's no reason Ryanair can't be cheap and profitable and still act in the reasonable way all other airlines do.

So I pledge that other than this flight (which was forced by family things) I will not fly by Ryanair*.

*Unless of:
- peer / family pressure
- no other option on a particular route
- Ryanair change of policy