please boycott ryanair

[hermykne]

this is why
he is anti family
he being michael o leary (who had his first child last year and should appreciate travelling with kids)

this week he bumped up taking a piece of luggage in the hold of the airplane by 50%

so in essence
a family of 4 buy their four equally priced flights, and then pay 114? to bring their clothes/toys/books on holidays with them.

he is a rip off merchant and i have so little respect for him even though he gave ireland a pathway to the world when aer lingus was incredible expensive..

so i shall not use ryanair unless absolutely vital.

please think before u have to pay your hard earned sckecles over to him/ryanair

it's dishonest because they don't tell you the bagage charges until you're nearly finished, and because they don't let you pool allowances. It doesn't cost them any more to take one 30kg hold bag than it does to take 2 15kg ones (or, indeed, 3 10kg cabin bags). You also have to pay for "priority boarding" for anyone who doesn't have a hold bag. that's not fair. and as a family, they won't necessarily let you use those priority cards because the ones with baggage won't have them. They don't allow families to board first nayway any more. that would deny them precious extra pennies. I agree with the op that they are anti-family.

Lyra: you wait. 1kg over that allowance and you will pay for it (and have to queue twice).

also Chippy, how do you manage to travel light with kids then? that's half the point really.

I agree that there are things about Ryanair that I do not find fair but at the end of the day, you have to decide how much you can afford (or want) to pay for your flights. If you can get Lufthansa or BA, then great, go for it.

I would love to be able to afford the luxury of Lufthansa, to see at a glance what the flight will cost and not have any hidden charges.

If I want to see my family more than once a year, then I am reliant on cheap airlines like Ryanair, German Wings et al.

Saying all of that, I have not flown with them for several years now so ask me again next Monday. Perhaps I will be on here posting an AIBU thread.

I'd agree that the website is PITA - last time we went (October) we checked a bag and car seat, no luggage for the DC. Didn't have to pay for priority boarding but did have to click around a bit to get it off the screen.

Travelling light is easy if you can do laundry. I know it's not everyone's idea of a holiday, but if staying with family/friends, not a problem. I usually pack 3 of everything plus what you have on and a couple of extra underwear.
Travel sized toiletries.
DC have their own little rucksack for (small & light) toys, crayons. Buy them a magazine at the airport. All other hand luggage goes in my Longchamp Pliage bag which weighs practically nothing and is huge.
Nylon holdalls save kilos over suitcases, whcih can take up 6-7kilos of your precious allowance.
Be ruthless, ditch any unnecessary items.

DH travels even lighter - he takes his oldest clothes, wears them, throws them away and buys new stuff to wear/bring home!!

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I don't like Ryanair since the air hostesses are routinely rude. I know it's a cheap service, they don't get paid much, have got quick turnarounds etc but politness costs nowt.

I boarded at Cork last year after a problem with my passport and was told to 'sit anywhere' despite there being plenty of seats with pairs and triples - I was travelling with my bf. The air hostess was actually blocking the aisle laying out her 'safety talk' stuff but there were still passengers boarding who wouldn't all have been able to sit in the two or three single seats in front of her! I much prefer EasyJet (or BA if I were better paid).

Btw there is a tab you can click to remove the priority boarding charge - they can't be faulted for that. They're probably obliged to put that in by law though.

I agree SueW - I flew to Ayr in November and there were about 3/4 of the plane in the priority queue and about 12 people in the non!! Since I was by myself, I gave it a miss. Don't forget the carbon footprint tax though. That gets added on towards the end.

What bugs me about Ryanair is the rugby scrum to try and get on the plane.

It is just appalling.

Whay can't they just give seat numbers. I would be prepared to pay extra like on Flybe to book a seat.

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Ryanair didn't offer me a carbon footprint tax (Easyjet did...)

Sue, granted if you have no hold baggage you can do free online check in, but if one passenger has hold baggage nobody in the party can do free online check in; even without any hold baggage they have to check in at the airport and pay £3 each way for the privilege (or else make 2 separate bookings FFS, and then remember to unclick all the options like priority boarding and insurance and ARE YOU SURE YOU DON'T WANT OUR LOVELY INSURANCE???)

And then when you come to pay it's £3 per person per flight to use a credit card, so on your £10 trip that would be £6 on top - banks only charge 2.5% so Ryanair would make another 57.5% on top of that

I HAVEN'T READ ANY OF THIS THREAD - NOT EVEN THE OP - BUT IF YOU WANT ME TO, I WILL

BUT ONLY BECAUSE IT'S YOU

suew tht is a bargain flight
but opening question says they are "anti family"
its fine if you are single/couple / older children who prob want to sit by themselves to use it but when you have kids under 2/3/4/5/6 its very hard.
the scrum to get seats is so stressful and priority booking as u say is a waste of money.

by all means if you can get deals use them but for me and my family its not worth it.

all i ask is for decent customer service and courtesy / help when boarding.
i have used them with my 2 both under 3 and it was appaulling.

anyway to the poster who said they work long hours - they dont - they cant under airline rules and reg, they work busy shifts - ie get in as many flights in their "time frame/shift" as possible.

Hope you don't mind a gransnetter joining in. No one seems to post on gransnet these days. We have used Ryanair lots of times and have no complaints. Only once was the flight late and that was coming back from France at 10.30pm and the flight caught £1.50. It is a pity they stopped the children and disabled priority boarding but when they did it, you could not get past with children as all the passengers were already in the queue. As some say 90% of passengers could have priority boarding cards as they only cost £2. However you get what you pay for and I would not be able to see so much of my grandchildren if it was not for the low cost airlines.

DH and I have a system to get seats together. He dashes through the gate with DS1 and an armful of coats. Gets on the back of the plane and baggsies 5 seats. I follow with DS2 and DD. Not sure what i'd do if travelling alone with the DC though, but people are generally accommodating.

I dislike Ryanair, not because I think they are anti-family but because I think they are anti-passenger. More than most companies, I get the impression from them that the passengers are just devices to funnel money into Ryanair's bank accounts.

I would argue that to remove priority boarding for disabled people (have they actually done that?) would breach the Disability Discrimination Act since they could be said to be making it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to use their service. There is a precedent for this. Ryanair were taken to court over their practice of charging a fee to people who needed the services of a wheelchair and escort to get to the gate because of a disability. The DDA forbids the imposition of additional charges for an auxiliary service that someone needs because of their disability in order to be able to use the company's services. I'm pleased to say that they lost but, in the course of that case, I lost any real respect I had for Ryanair.

I believe that Michael O'Leary (and apparently the airline's PR man, see the story about the advert that they refuse to withdraw despite an ASA ruling) believe that all money is rightfully theirs and that anyone who tries to limit or regulate their business practices is in the wrong.

Yes, of course, they were pioneers in low-cost aviation but they have gone too far. They believe that running a low-cost service absolves them of any responsibility for providing customer service. Do you remember hearing about the cancelled flights and stranded passengers who got absolutely b*er all help from the airline to get home? Would those of you speaking in their defence still feel so supportive if it had been you, or perhaps your elderly relative, stuck in France with no means to get home (to Scotland, in this case)?

MsH - that's exactly what i think about them. The passengers are just an inconvenience to them.

In some ways at least they are honest about it as they make absolutely no pretence of caring about customer satisfaction.

If you don't like the rugby scrum to get on the plane, don't get involved. If you're travelling with children older than say, 7, does it really matter if they're sitting one or two rows from you for one or two hours?

Or do what I do and say to someone who is obviously travelling alone, if they would mind swapping seats so you can sit together. If anyone refuses, another reasonable person always offers.

If I'm travelling alone, I always offer to swap seats if there's a spare beside me in order to let people sit together. Swings and roundabouts.

If there was any way in which the crap that Ryanair dish out could be said to be necessary then I'd agree with you, twelveyeargap. But what difference does it actually make to Ryanair whether they do priority boarding or not?

And yes, it does matter to me that I sit together with my family especially when I can see no good reason for it to be otherwise. The only reason Ryanair have for doing it is so that they can dupe us into thinking we are paying 99p for a flight (or whatever) when we are really paying more.

Why else do most people (according to a number of posts in this thread) pay the extra for priority boarding? It's surely because they don't actually want to risk sitting scattered all over the plane just because they hadn't sharpened their elbows enough. And if everyone pays for priority boarding, nobody actually gets it, do they?

I get annoyed because "service" like this can tend to pitch people against each other when the real "enemy" is the company.

It's quicker to board a plane if people just sit down as they board, instead of blocking the aisles whilst they find their seat number. It's a very simple decision to save money. They are running a business after all. At times offering flights for less money than it costs to get a Tube across London, where quite frankly, the conditions are often much worse.

Ryanair do not force people to queue up for 40 minutes before the flight leaves so they can be first on the plane. The passengers themselves started that nonsense some time after Ryanair started up.

If it's that important to you to get a seat number, then go and pay for it elsewhere. If non-budget airlines charge for it, albeit by building it in to the price, what's wrong with Ryanair charging for it up front? Nobody is forced to fly with Ryanair, so why should I be pressured into not flying with them by hysterical passengers who expect too much from a budget airline?

I'm sorry, twelveyeargap, I didn't realise that being treated like a human being and valued customer and not a nuisance was "expecting too much from a budget airline". As a matter of fact, I do, when I fly, "pay for it elsewhere", not to "get a seat number" but to be treated with courtesy and respect.

Evidently it is people like you who are willing to settle for being treated like this that allows Ryanair to continue to do it.

I repeat my point from a previous post. There are those who wish to fly who might reasonably argue that they need the priority boarding and need to be assured of a particular seat or type of seat - extra leg room (increasingly important as more and more seats are crammed in)if you happen to be taller than 5'7", for example, or those with limited mobility. If Ryanair does not operate any sort of priority boarding scheme for disabled travellers, I would not be surprised if they were, at some point, found to have breached the Disability Discrimination Act. Or does that not matter to you, twelveyeargap?

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I hate Ryanair with a passion, it is worse than taking a bus imo, BUT unfortunately for many folk (like me) it has the most convenient flights and the best priced flights (even considering the billions of "hidden" charges) for where I need to go most frequently.

The funniest bit about Ryanair is when you are mid air and they do their "you could be a MILLIONAIRE with RYANAIR" crap. I just want to get from A to B. I know that overcharging for food is how they make money, but midflight sweepstakes? FGS, give me a break!