Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights (2018)
blog.jldc.me
blog.jldc.me
There was also a big thread at the time (2018): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18526261. Since the cutoff is about a year, that repost was ok, but the current one was not ok.
This is an interesting conclusion. I would say that being cheap and terrible are not two extremes, but the same one.
Sometimes it's so cheap all other stuff might be palatable if you're getting a 10x price reduction vs another ticket
However, they have investigated (and I believe are still investigating) whether it would be possible to have a standing plane.
To be honest, for the Dublin to London route it wouldn't be too bad.
You can't see their fares except on their webpage, not on a travel search. They include bags and others don't which can be nice, but makes comparison difficult. Etc.
Bread and water would probably be more expensive.
They also have poorly trained pilots, who either aren’t qualified for ILS or aren’t confident in poor conditions - on numerous occasions I’ve been on flights which they’ve diverted (Bristol becomes Birmingham, Bergerac becomes Toulouse, Porto becomes Madrid) because of weather, while other airlines land and take off without issue.
This is straight-up defamatory. Ryanair have similar entry requirements to the majors, much better training and equipment, and the best safety record of any airline in the world. No one gets an EASA Part FCL without ILS, and every Ryanair pilot will be absolutely confident in ILS approaches - most will have done far more than other airline pilots.
Do you have any reference to the claim of "much better training" and "far more [ILS approaches] than other airline pilots"?
Hawaii Airlines for example has not had a single fatal crash since it’s founding in 1929.
I don't see any basis for your claim that their safety record is "practically blank". They are widely considered the world's safest airline - a spot they shared with Southwest until SWA1380.
If we are trying to find ‘the best’ airline in the industry you need to either consider only current practices/equipment etc, or look for airlines with zero crashes despite higher expected lifetime risks.
So why can’t they land or take off in fog or rain, when other airlines can? I’m guessing you work for them, so I’d love an explanation.
Cheap insurance policies that don’t cover it?
I’ve also experienced more atrocious landings with Ryanair than any other airline - flaring late, early, or not at all - they must spend a fortune repairing undercarriage.
I don’t buy it. Bargain basement airline, bargain basement pilots.
I mean, if they were any good, they’d fly for one of the majors, rather than a notoriously mean employer, no?
That's not been my experience. I had a cancelled return flight, received an SMS about 6 hours before the scheduled departure. I was able to exchange online my flight for another one going to Budapest (I just wanted to be anywhere in the EU at least) where I stayed for the night and took another plane home.
Once home, I submitted all this to their customer service and I was totally reimbursed, even though the cancellation was due to a strike in Brussels and not their fault. I was honestly surprised not to have to fight.
Completely wrong they have the same requirements as any other airline. It's the law to have a APL and a type rating + check rides every 6 months -- just like any European airline.
I ended up having to take a bus from London to Berlin. Naturally they refused to pay for any of that and the emergency hotel.
Never. Again.
My most recent pain came about due to the coronavirus stuff, my flights were cancelled which I expected and is understandable, and they offered me two options: a refund or a flight voucher. Their site would simply not process the refund at all however, everything was lightning fast and refund button immediately returned an error saying there was heavy traffic and they couldn't service my request. Well fair enough, I thought, there's likely a few people like me. I tried this for nearly 2 weeks (sometimes at 2-4am) before I finally somehow managed to get the manual refund form to submit without error. Then a week later they sent me emails saying I needed to hurry up and either claim my refund or take the flight voucher.
I find out later that they just completely shut off the refund processing altogether because their staff simply weren't around. This was all a charade to scare you into not trying to claim your refund.
If they were up-front about it, fine - everyone's a bit more forgiving due to the Coronavirus crisis, it has wrong-footed many of us. But faking service outages over to spook people into not getting their money is just so typically Michael O'Leary and so ... Ryanair.
Monarch especially was great as they had a direct flight from my old local airport to Gibraltar.
Unlike Eulerian paths, which are detectable in linear time [2], detecting Hamiltonian paths is NP-complete [3]. Does anyone have an intuitive explanation for why this is the case?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23123754
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulerian_path#Hierholzer's_alg...
Imagine building a Eulerian path. You're standing at a node, trying to figure out which edge to go down next. Eventually, because it's a Eulerian path, you'll have to go down all the edges eventually. This means it doesn't matter which edge you go down--even if your path hits a dead end, you can magically go back in time and patch in a cycle to your original path.
Put another way, if you establish that a graph has a Eulerian path, every maximal set of edge-disjoint cycles in the graph constitutes that path. Just by looking and making decisions at a very localized context (every node), you can formulate a correct answer.
By contrast, Hamiltonian paths are rarer. Only some maximal sets of node-disjoint cycles can be combined to construct a Hamiltonian path. You don't have the property that you can trivially patch the cycles together if you make a mistake. Looking at a node and trying to decide which next node to pick, you'd have to understand the structure of the entire graph very well to understand if traversing to A will screw you up, and the ramifications are not local.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Computation-Cristopher-Moore-d...
£140 would have probably included things like baggage, more leg room, perhaps less restrictive ticket terms and food on a full service airline with eg better IRROPS handling.
* If you're curious about the implementation, see https://github.com/DragosMocrii/flights-search-app
Ryanair is cheap. Tickets can be 9.99, 12.99 Euros. (One Way). I have often speculatively bought these tickets for a trip that might or might not occur and then let them expire. Obviously this is part of their business strategy.
But Ryanair is great.
By the way, Kiwi.com also searches flights with Ryanair connecting flights (AKA Flight hacks). They once offered me a 50 Euros trip from Duesseldorf to Malta with 5 tickets, including going to Bucharest, Berlin etc. I would have been on the road/in the air for two days.
In general, it's not worth paying more than 50-60 EUR for a one-way ticket, and it's not worth expecting any compensations or support if something goes wrong.
Nobody expects a restaurant experience from a fast-food chain.
I strongly believe that if one wants the level of customer service of a traditional airline, (s)he should be flying with a traditional airline, – and paying for it.