Hacker News Reader

Comment by pzmarzly | Hacker News Reader

I was caught by this surprise pricing once, so I'll explain: printing a boarding pass at the airport is €20, but that's only if you have checked in online beforehand.

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.

View on HN

Is printing it necessary btw?

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.

If you buy from certain resellers, these won't share the necessary login details with you to load the boarding pass into the official app.

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 if you are booking via e.g. Kiwi.com, you will probably never visit Ryanair's site and you will miss this detail.

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€.

Moreover, if you arrive at the airport 3 hours before but spend one hour in the check-in queue, you will fall into the two hours time window and pay 50 EUR for effectively having the boarding pass printed.

A court in Vienna previously ruled against them, but they just ignore that everywhere else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com