So charging for carry on bags is a logical approach if you wish to minimize the operating costs of the airline which budget airlines do.
>It is abusive, because it's basically lying about the real cost of the ticket.
In the US every airline that does this makes it comically clear. Spirit, the one people always make fun of for nickel and diming, has multiple screens before you book telling you that it'll cost extra for bags. Every other airline does similar.
Yes queue the 'but I have 9 children' posts, obviously then you need to pay a bag fee.
I've seen tons of people with 3 bags, huge bags, and things like that. Frustratingly, this mostly affects people like me who don't do that, because I'll be the one asked to put my relatively small backpack under the seat because they're out of space, and being close to 2 metres it's not like I have tons of space to start with. Never too happy about that.
I haven't flown in a while, but generally RyanAir has been pretty relaxed about this, probably because it's just not worth the hassle and all of that. But seriously, fuck these people and fuck their fucking bags and I don't blame RyanAir for placing some incentives to stop the excesses.
I can clearly see the slippery slope if rules like this were not be enforced.
This is true but if we want to play the pure fairness game should someone who is 150 pounds pay less than someone who is 200 pounds? What about a 90 pound kid? These are drastic differences in weight and all 3 humans would likely fit in the dimensions of 1 standard economy seat.
Arbitrarily charging upwards of $200 USD to check a bag at the gate because your carry on personal item was 0.5 pounds too heavy doesn't seem reasonable. A lot of consumer grade scales aren't even accurate to half a pound, you may have done the work to measure it and be wrong because you don't have a high precision scale that's as accurate as the industrial scale at the airport.
For having a person who could be helping someone with real issues print a piece of paper instead, yes.
- Prohibit showing the QR code from a PDF on your phone (it has to be printed on physical paper, or you have to use the app instead)
- Make it intentionally hard/impossible to get your boarding pass bought from a third-party reseller into their first-party app
In other words, my "non-real issue" was entirely manufactured by Ryanair to extract more money from me (by frustrating third-party resellers without outright banning them in a way that makes them prone to competitive lawsuits)
This doesn't seem like it can be anything but ripping people off for making a mistake, or as charitably as I can possibly get making people who made a mistake subsidize flights for the more meticulous people in an attempt to make tickets (appear to) cost less to get more business.
There's even an entire second-order cottage industry benefiting from that practice: At the airport I was trying to board, there was a copyshop offering PDF printouts for 50 cent a page (yay) – except if the page is a boarding pass, for which the rate is then 10€.
Yes, they employ a person to specifically check what you're printing...
The costs are so high because they want to really really disincentive people from using staff for this kind of thing, so on average they won't have to hire as much staff.
This is one reason why some RyanAir flights can be as low as €20 (whereas e.g. KLM is €200 for a similar or identical flight).
On bigger airports it's not a huge problem because you can typically use the machines, which are free.
But checking in in-person is €0 only if there's more than 2 hours left until the planned departure, it is €55 if there is less. So in practice, a lot of people end up paying €75 for something that's free when flying with other airlines.
In Ryanair's defence, they explain it on their site. But if you are booking via e.g. Kiwi.com, you will probably never visit Ryanair's site and you will miss this detail.
A court in Vienna previously ruled against them, but they just ignore that everywhere else.
And that's exactly why they even do this in the first place!
They can't outright ban Kiwi.com from reselling their tickets, so they fight a proxy fight on the backs of their own customers.
I'm glad to hear that they have at least dropped their fee significantly; back when I ran into this issue, they were charging over 100€.
I ask because RyanAir has official documentation at https://help.ryanair.com/hc/en-us/articles/12889667116433-Wh... and https://help.ryanair.com/hc/en-us/sections/12488861427857-Bo....
The way I parse them is if you're flying anywhere, unless it's from Morocco or specific airports listed in their FAQ then you don't need to physically print your boarding pass as long as you can pull it up on your phone. This would include foreign travelers such as someone from the US who is flying between countries in the EU based on there not being an explicit call out for that.
Ryanair's app (unlike other airlines') intentionally does not allow loading a boarding pass/reservation using just your name and reservation code to discourage these third-party resellers – at the expense of their customers.
But yeah, I never fly with them; uncomfortable, annoying, only Boeings etc. I’ll pay more, it’s fine.
A better approach would be to offer an incentive for tickets on your phone (as long as it wasn't a data grab)