This and the comment you're replying to capture the Ryanair experience really well: if everything goes exactly to plan, well ... it's fine. However if anything goes awry, god help you. Pretty much everyone I know has encountered an issue with Ryanair - the ol' sneaky extras they slip into your booking, cancelled flights, overbooked flights, checked luggage that gets bumped to the next flight, and so on.

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.

> 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.

> they always find a way to worm out of the EC compensation directive

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.

>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.

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 dont believe it is pilot training, but rather Ryanair doesnt always install proper lighting for heavy fog nor do the smaller european airports on the runways themselves. The lack of more advanced lighting on the planes is probably fine for major european airports that have ground lighting rated to a category of visibility, but the smaller airports have a lesser lighting and fewer backups so combined with Ryanair planes the pilots don’t/can’t risk landing. I had this experience in Poland, where a ryanair flight was expected to land in Bydgoszcz but landed in Gdansk instead (without informing anyone in English of what or where we were)

Who cares? Just put in headphones.