Ryanair checkin - help please

[TheWrongBus]

TLDR: we may need to change our post Xmas Ryanair flights relatively last minute. Should I hold off checking in or does it make no difference (ie will they sting me for the same fees and put me through the wringer either way)?

We are due to be flying with Ryanair to the continent just after Xmas for over a week but MIL has just received a cancer diagnosis and it’s not looking good 😔
We may need to change our flights and plans generally eg I may bring kids home early and leave DH out there to spend more time with his DM and/or help his DF.
Ryanair checkin has opened and I would normally check us in now but I wonder if I should wait until we have a better idea of our plans? With traditional airlines/holidays there used to be more flexibility to change before you’d checked in but I don’t think that’s the case with Ryanair. I’ve never needed to change last minute with them though so I don’t know.

Our kids are late primary age so it’s not the end of the world if we aren’t sat together on the short flight.

thanks

Incidentally I don’t even know if Ryanair would let us split the single booking so DH travels home separately from us. I’m sure they won’t make it easy, or cheap 😔

What do the terms of your ticket say?

I can’t bring myself to try to find them and wade through them, partly because I’m not convinced they will actually spell it out (having tried and failed to find answers in the ts and ca to other questions before), but also because I’ve had flu for 2 weeks now and my head is still full of cotton wool and I have another splitting headache coming on 😞
Not expecting anyone to read them on my behalf, just wondering if anyone already knew from experience.

I'd check in to ensure you'd chosen your seats. Last thing you want is to be stung with everyone sitting separately. I havent checked the terms but Ryanair aren't known for their flexibility so I doubt it matters from a change/cancel point of view at this point.

Ryanair are known for charging for every possible thing, but I am fairly certain that they treat everyone in a booking as an individual traveller, so that one person coming back later wouldn’t affect others.
I am not sure about the checking in part. I got a message at some stage warning me that if I confirmed details no changes could be made, but I can’t remember if that was when I put in personal details or did the seat booking.
It seems logical that they will be more reluctant to make any changes once you’ve checked in and got a boarding pass.

If you have reserved seats as part of your booking then there is no benefit to checking in 30 days in advance versus 2½ hours, other than to have got that small chore done. That said, it doesn't seem to affect the cost of making changes, but it certainly can't make things easier if you've checked in (apart from anything else, you will need to check in again if you change something!), so I wouldn't bother for now.

In terms of what changes you can make: Unless you bought Flexi-Plus tickets your only option is to "rebook" (change to another flight), which costs £45 per person. You cannot do this in two stages (i.e., cancel the flight for credit and then rebook later); you have to say "I was travelling on the 18th but now I want to move my flight to the 24th" all in one go, with your new choice of flight ready.

If the original flight was £50 and the new one is £75 you will also have to pay the difference. If the new flight is cheaper you don't get the difference deducted from the rebooking fee, of course. (Ryanair is a plc and you can buy shares, which doesn't get you any privileges but might at least make you feel slightly more favourable about their rather rapacious business model.)

I haven't been able to find out if you can rebook for only some of the passengers on a booking, as opposed to all of them. You can maybe try this yourself, though. Click on the button to change the booking and see if it will let you select individual passengers. Don't worry, you can back out before paying so that the change doesn't become definitive!

Presumably you bought travel insurance, but whether it will cover cancellation "to spend more time with a sick parent" (as opposed to something a bit more objective, like a death) will require close study of the T&Cs.

Our kids are late primary age so it’s not the end of the world if we aren’t sat together on the short flight.

It might not be the end of the world, but Ryanair expects children under 12 to be sat next to an adult, and requires you to purchase a seat for the adult to allow this to happen. They then give the children assigned seats for free.

So it's only the return portion you need to change? I would check-in only for the outbound flight. I think you are probably going to have to speak to a representative, because they will need to split your original booking into two in order for you to travel home separately, but it will be easier to change things if you are not already checked in. I have done similar but not with Ryanair.

Thank you for your responses, especially @samarrange for going into so much detail.

We definitely don’t have flexi tickets, but we do already seem to have specific seats allocated which I think must have been because of the rule that with kids you have to reserve seats near them. I was worrying that if we didn’t check in until late then we may find ourselves bumped off the flight if it’s overbooked but perhaps that’s a risk with the non-budget airlines only.

It’s more likely we’d need to change the return flight, but it’s possible we’d need to change the outbound too if eg MIL deteriorates quickly and DH needs to get out there ASAP. She has oncologist appointments in the next few days so I’m hoping we may have some clarity then.

I’ll check travel insurance too, I took out a new policy only about a month ago before we saw this coming, but I’m not sure it would cover this scenario. And if it did the excess would probably swallow up most of the extra costs.

Don't worry about that. As long as you check in on time, it wouldn't be you who got bumped in an over booking situation. Why? Because they'd be liable to compensate you and you are more expensive as a family than someone travelling alone.

Re booking. Honestly if youve got cheap ryanair tickets it's often not worth even looking at doing a rebooking because of the cost of doing something.

We've had a situation where we couldn't travel on original dates and ultimately it was cheaper to just right it off and rebook alternative flights. If it comes to it, you may be able to rebook depending on your terms but if you really can't fly you just can't so just take the hint.

In terms of flying alone if you've booked as a family. That's perfectly ok. How do I know? Well there was the time I lost my passport and I had to be abandoned whilst DH returned alone.

I was worrying that if we didn’t check in until late then we may find ourselves bumped off the flight if it’s overbooked but perhaps that’s a risk with the non-budget airlines only.

There are a few considerations:

• With some airlines, if you book a return trip and don't take the outward leg they will cancel your reservation for the return unless you contact them. But all low-cost airlines basically only think about single trips.
• Ryanair never, ever overbooks. They are quite proud of this, whatever their other slightly sharp practices might be. EasyJet occasionally does, but not very often.
• Sometimes an airline has to bump people if the plane breaks and they replace it with a smaller one. This can happen on EasyJet if you were booked on an A321/320 and they replace it with a 320/319. Until recently this was never a problem with Ryanair because all their planes were the 737-800 with exactly 189 seats, but now they have the 737-Max8 with 197. So we might start to see situations where up to 8 people get bumped if they need to change the plane. But these situations are very rare anyway.
• Having already checked in (early) doesn't get you much advantage if the plane is overbooked anyway. They don't know that the overbooking is a problem until everyone gets to the gate. The airline will usually ask for volunteers first, and sometimes offer them double the standard EU261 compensation. Only if they don't get enough volunteers will they pick people at the gate, and families with children are less likely to get bumped than single travellers.