Ryanair – when every page is a dark pattern | Hacker News Reader

Ryanair – when every page is a dark pattern

hallofshame.design

312 pointspopcalc296 comments

This website doesn't even touch on the worst dark patterns. Ryanair will e-mail you and complain that you booked using a travel agent (like trip.com). Well yes, Ryanair itself put their flights on Amadeus! If you only want people to book directly using your site, then make a business decision to lose the outside business and don't complain to your customer like a toddler.

They then charge you to use an app to scan your ID, some ridiculously low amount like 60 cents. The transactions costs and the software maintenance on this integration must dwarf the actual revenue generated. But you need to do this for reasons, one of which apparently is that not doing it will add an even higher fee. This is nickel and diming by instinct rather than out of any rational thinking.

One side effect of all of these tacked-on fees and dark patterns is that the supposed perks lose any meaning. Everyone ends up paying for 'speedy boarding', so that the 'speedy boarding' actually takes longer than the people who board last. And even the 'speedy boarding' passengers won't be able to fit their bags on board.

I actively avoid (and told my SO to never book) Ryanair. None of the other low cost airlines are this bad. Literally Easyjet are easier to deal with. Easyjet also have dark patterns (literally, always look for the grey text..) but they don't go out of their way to make you suffer.

Also, how degrading is it for flight attendents to have to go around selling scratch cards? I'm sure Ryanair would have them go around selling fentanyl if it were up to corporate.

Boarding planes is the proof of our failure as a species. Something so easy made so complicated.

It's highly studied and highly optimised

Any appearance of complication just means the airline cares more about revenue

So, we're back to the age old debate and wonders of greed and capitalism

Exactly, it's all about revenue. Not only for the airlines, but also for the airports. It's intentionally inconvenient so they can make a lot more money.

"Everyone ends up paying for 'speedy boarding'"

That has never happened on any Ryanair flight I've been on.

I never understood why you'd want to be on the plane early. I don't really find it more comfortable on the plane than at the gate, and it's not like you're gonna take off faster than the last people to board. Almost feels like a trap to get people who don't fly often to pay a little more.

Overhead space. Not being forced to check a bag at the gate.

you may be able to get overhead bin space (near your seat)

If you get on later, there might not be room in the overhead compartment. That's the only rational reason I can come up with to get on the plane earlier.

I flew Ryanair only twice this year, but both times you had to pay extra to use the overhead bins anyway. They were fairly empty thanks to this.

> you had to pay extra to use the overhead bins

I'm not sure if I'm shocked to hear this because it breaks my expectations, or because it's just silly.

Given that the overhead bins are usually highly congested, the capitalist playbook clearly says you should be able to solve this space allocation problem by introducing a cost for the space usage.

Except the overhead bins only got cluttered in the first place because capitalists took something that was usually included, a checked bag, and charged $50 for it, so now passenger planes fly with pretty underfilled cargo areas and overstuffed overhead compartments that make it take 2x as long to board and deboard the plane.

So yeah, inventing a problem where there wasn't one and selling a solution IS actually the capitalist playbook.

FYI, the low cost airlines in the US are actually in a business crisis right now, because their cost per seat mile has doubled and none of them are really making a profit, while the legacy carriers are making reasonable profit. So expect some truly offensive bullshit from "low cost" carriers to offset their bad business decisions.

They doubled their fleet size but now each plane is flying fewer hours per day, and wouldn't you know that's bad for an airline, from an economics perspective.

This might be true for low-cost airlines, but is it for the traditional ones?

I recall times where checked luggage was included in the air fare, but people would still fill up the overhead space, as it was simply more convenient (and quicker) to have your luggage with you, instead of having to wait for your checked luggage to show up 10-40 Minutes after leaving the plane.

Oh the good old days of flying in to Tegel (Berlin), time from the Gate to the Taxi? Approximately 3 Minutes.

Nowadays, it seems everything goes extra, as that allows airlines to list first on any of the travel portals where people buy their flights nowadays.

On budget airlines you almost always only get a backpack included which goes under the seats. They usually bundle the small onboard suitcase option with "Priority boarding", usually because people with suitcases board slower and splitting up those with suitcases and those without speeds up boarding. And if you don't have Priority but come in with a suitcase you will 99% of the time be stopped and forced to pay a fee.

IMHO it isn't a terrible policy per se since it allows for savvy, usually younger, and usually poorer travellers to get even cheaper plane tickets and travel more but I do think there needs to be a cap on the price of "Priority" since during busy times the budget airlines, especially WizzAir in my experience, jack up prices substantially. I had to fly in my suit for a wedding once because the "Priority" charge for both ways was 130€.

Not sillier than charging 2 euros for using an effin' toilet. That's probably unlawful in many places, not sure if they actually implemented it but at least serious PR was happening around it few years back. Imagine if you simply don't have cash on you and your cards ain't working for some reason (or wallet stolen etc).

Luckily for us Ryanair practically ignores our closest airport (Geneva), but due to Swiss air being greedy and corrupty, they prevented Easyjet from having their main airport in Zurich, and Geneva it is. So we get all these nice direct flights to most of Europe, North Africa and Middle east that even Swiss airlines don't cover. Prices are usually fine too, if booked long enough in advance and not during top breaks. Ie recently went to Morocco for some paragliding during easter for like 70 USD. Next best flight would be 4x the cost and 3x the time.

The toilet charge is (and it should be obvious) a marketing ploy — it gets the Ryanair boss interviews in the media, and reminds people that Ryanair is so cheap it's not worth checking the competitors.

Put it this way.....

If they did implement such a charge, the aircraft would get very smelly.

> Imagine if you simply don't have cash on you and your cards ain't working

I’m sure they’d bill the same card that you used to buy the ticket

I like that they do it this way. The bins always had plenty of space when I took the option, and otherwise you travel with a backpack which fits under the seat in front of you for the lowest ticket price.

The boarding and disembarking procidures are also much faster with Ryanair in part thanks to this policy, the other being air stairs boarding from both ends of the plane.

They offer a cheap 10kg hold luggage option in case the overhead bins have been sold out or you need to take a small suitcase with forbidden items.

Even if you pay, they may decide that your bag is not suitable for the overhead compartment. I once had a 40-liter backpack thrown on my lap by a flight attendant because it fits under the seat and she didn't have room for someone else's suitcase. Why they limit the underseat bag to a ridiculously small volume is a good question.

Yeah that makes sense I guess. Though that hasn't happened to me yet (couple of hundred flights in total I'd guess). I would probably have been nervous about this kind of stuff before my days as a relatively frequent flyer.

Sounds like an airline problem, not a customer problem. The airline should ensure enough storage space instead of having customers compete for storage space. Ryan Air looks like a bad experience to me based on people saying you have to board early to get storage space.

I been on flights where they just go to the people in the back of the line and says "sorry, your bag must be checked in because we dont have enough room in the overheads". Kind of sucks when you just got carry on (because now they will throw your luggage among the checked in bags and they might damage it and you have to wait in the airport for your bag)

I've never actually flown Ryan Air, but I'm pretty sure this is a perennial issue on Delta. They wind up checking people's luggage for free when it doesn't fit.

Well it's not a problem for Ryanair if it means they can charge extra to give you a better chance of getting storage.

Ryanair isn't a good experience, but it isn't terrible either. I fly with them most of the time from the UK to other European countries, and I don't pay for any extras - usually I just pack light and only take cabin luggage that can fit under the seat. Mentally I, guess I treat it like it's a bus ride - it's not going to be fancy, comfortable, or fast, there's going to be a lot of waiting around. It gets me from A to B safely and cheaply, as long as I don't fall for any of their dark patterns.

There is enough guaranteed storage underneath the seat that the lowest tier ticket guarantees, overhead sized luggage has become an extra fee for the last ~7 years.

In certain airports/flights, where you have to take a bus from the gate to the plane after boarding at the gate counter, 'speedy boarding' can actually work against its intended purpose. This is because you'll end up boarding the bus first, and if you choose to take a seat rather than standing close to the doors, everyone else will leave the bus before you to board the plane. I've seen this happening countless times.

At Berlin airport, boarding (at least in the low-cost terminal) works by checking tickets and moving passengers to a closed area with few or no seats. And they do not open the actual boarding (with the bus) until everyone is in that area. So the so-called "priority" passengers are the first to be in that area, standing and waiting for everyone else to fill that area.

The point still stands. A bus is pretty much a FILO queue, so the order inverts when they climb in the Bus.

Southwest is one, where late boarders always get the middle seat.

That sucks.

BTDT.

Hilarious. So the people more likely to pay to board early are the ones more likely to have a lot of luggage?

Maybe they will start charging double for passengers that want to beat the passengers that want to board early? Early boarding pre boarding.

"In the US this can be common and the staff low key make everyone anxious about it. Like "uh oh guys, room is running out in the overhead" "might have to check your bag". It's not the end of the world, but it's an easy thing to ham up from the framework of annoyance and unfairness. You don't get the convenience because the guy in front of you got there first, and now you're waiting +30 minutes for the bag to be released from the cargo compartment. And maybe he brought 3 bags, over the limit, and you have just one smaller bag. You know what unfairness and anxiety like this generates? Sales and an arms race to board ever earlier with ever more bags at an ever higher price. If this trend continues eventually it will just be one guy with 1000 bags who pays $50,000 to board first and filling up all the bins at once. "

Because some companies sell more than places in the plane and there are places that same sit is given to more than one person and there are situations when last on the line can not get on the place since all places are occupied. It happened for friends of us.

Uh, that's scary! I had this happen on one flight, they asked someone to take the next flight for some kind of bonus and someone volunteered.

Pretty insane that this can happen in the first place, but I guess with something like Ryanair I can see how people might want to play it safe then!

I don't think Ryanair does this.

Ryanair absolutely does this. I've been on a flight in the last 3 months that was +2 oversold. Everyone else had checked in online earlier than me and gotten a seat assignment, so I was held at the gate, unable to pass, until the gate was ready to close and they had confirmed they had a seat for me.

The 'rules' state that they're supposed to ask for volunteers, but in this instance, they didn't. I was just withheld from boarding until they confirmed they had a seat for me.

But you can't even get to the gate if you haven't checked in, at which point you get an assigned seat. If you somehow managed to get past the entry point and security without checking in then something went wrong at the airport, not with RyanAir.

I don’t think this is true — every airline that I know of supports “seat assignment at gate” to handle exactly this kind of overbooking.

(How it happens can vary: your PNR might not have a seat assigned, or the seat might have been double booked. Either way, at check-in they’ll typically notify you and let you through regardless, since you have a perfectly valid ticket.)

Same as the sibling comment already stated, I was able to check in, and instead of being assigned seat 24B (or something of that calibre), my boarding pass said “seat assigned at gate”.

I still had a valid boarding pass. Nothing went wrong at the airport, besides Ryanair failing to follow correct overbooking procedure. Fortunately in that instance, had they refused boarding on me, I would have suffered zero inconvenience, and have received 350 euros compensation and a flight the next day. In a way, I wish they had refused me that day.

Pretty much every airline overbooks?

Don't think this works at least in Europe due to regulations. Due to some kind of error, I was bumped from from a flight a year ago, which meant I a) got a free flight the next day b) got the cost of food and a hotel for the night back from the airline, and c) around 80€ flat.

So unless you absolutely have to be there the day of your flight, it is even a pretty good deal to stay.

> c) around 80€ flat.

Then they cheated you.

The cash compensation in Europe if they bump you is 250 - 600 EUR per flight and person, depending on distance. That even applies for significant delays.

To be fair, it can be a hassle to get it. But sometimes, if the airline is clearly at fault not.

And for the record: Every airline overbooks. But usually they find enough volounteers to make it work.

I think this is more an American phenomenon; Ryanair does not systematically do it as far as I know. The EU's passenger rights reg would make this extremely expensive for the airline.

TLDR; People don't trust airline and airport with their carry on.

It's all about being sure your carry on luggage will be in the plane with you and not have to be checked in.

People don't want to pay for that and don't trust the airport to get the luggage to their destination.

Also if you do multi flight with different airlines that don't have code share you'd have to go take your luggage and checked in it again, do security etc ... (Depends on the airport).

It's because, certainly the last time I was on Ryanair, if you wanted cabin baggage the cheapest way to get it was to order Speedy Boarding.

Because they limit it to 100 people. Because it's actually about guaranteed on board baggage in the lockers (in as much as Ryanair guarantee anything)

It very much depends on the route. If it's, say, Dublin/London (which is mostly business travel, over and back in a day or so), then you won't see much of this, but if it's to a holiday destination, you see it a lot because it allows you to bring on a 10kg bag instead of checking it.

Yet I can't ever think of a Ryanair flight I've seen go out with a single spare seat. There are plenty enough people who don't mind abuse of the save a few cents. Good luck to them. Keeps them off my flights.

I think that for the average person, not represented on this website, it's actually very important to save money, and just suffer the cheapest option available.

I've taken maybe 16 ryanair flights this year (it's the only airline that does the city combination I want), and more than half of those flights have gone mostly empty. Those flights were also the cheapest. The ones that went full were the most expensive.

So feel free to add my anecdote to yours, and derive nothing statistically significant besides that I fly a route that is only intermittently popular.

..I'm also flexible on dates so I deliberately book cheaper days, which may make for self selection in this way.

16 flights this year already? I guess it really is dirt cheap to fly around Europe. For me, flying in Canada is expensive, and such an ordeal that it isn't something I could see myself doing that often.

40-100 euros return for not that short trips. That is only slightly more than 160km train rides here...

The cheap trips clock in around 60 euros return. The expensive ones have clocked in around 100 euros return. Honestly, parking at the airport is more expensive than the cost of the flights most of the time.

I find that the best way to avoid abuse is to fly first class. Plus, it includes free checked bags, champagne, and a nice curtain to hide the view of the peasants.

> 'speedy boarding'

More like speedy boarding (i.e. first to board) the bus that takes all passengers from the terminal to the aircraft!

At least the airports I frequently fly from, that's rare - you're walking from the gate down a bunch of stairs and then across the tarmac directly to the door.

> Well yes, Ryanair itself put their flights on Amadeus

Pretty sure 99% of OTAs don't book Ryanair flights through Amadeus, but through screen scraping.

Why?

Annoying way I've caught myself between Ryanair and agent. I didn't want to book layover flights myself (painful using Ryanair website) so I've used one of the agent sites.

If you wanna do online checking you need to login using email and not PNR+last_name like most sites. Of course agent used their email and flight was early enough that agent wasn't reachable by phone when my flight commenced. I had to pay 6x20 euro fee at airport for printing a boarding pass, which is a dark pattern by itself.

The thing is you can't do proper layovers with budget airlines. Those third-party sites that try to make it happen are incredibly dodgy and if something goes wrong they have no legal obligation to offer proper rebooking since they are not required (and usually don't) have any sort of partnership with any of the airlines.

If I wanted to make a connection with a budget airline I would always allocate at least one night at the intermediary stop since you need to leave the duty-free area anyways, just in case something goes wrong. It's just not worth the risk.

It depends. If your total trip cost is €150 vs €400 - it is worth it.

But if your next leg is €1000 then it’s tricky, but sometimes it’s the only option you have.

> I'm sure Ryanair would have them go around selling fentanyl if it were up to corporate.

Ryanair boss said that he'd buy all the 737 MAX he could get because for the right price people are still gonna fly. So yes, I'm sure they would sell fentanyl if they thought they could get away with it.

Door plugs are an up-charge.

I think they have such dense configurations that they have actual doors. So no worries there...

>>They then charge you to use an app to scan your ID, some ridiculously low amount like 60 cents.

They are probably not doing the IDV themselves, they are using a another service that charges per ID.

Now, it maybe ridiculous that they are passing the cost through, but it's actually interesting that it is a option that people can choose or not.

If they didn't do this, they would just increase the costs by 60c for everyone.

> they would just increase the costs by 60c for everyone.

Which would be a better customer experience for everyone in the end and probably save time and money for Ryanair.

They email you even if you book on their official website. And it happens all the time, every single booking I made last year. Their support says there's nothing they can do about it, you just have to keep verifying your identity.

> They then charge you to use an app to scan your ID, some ridiculously low amount like 60 cents.

Where is this? I never had to scan an ID, just enter my details.

> They then charge you to use an app to scan your ID, some ridiculously low amount like 60 cents

Huh? never had to scan my ID upon booking a flight. On rare occasions I had to submit my passport details. Usually for flights to the UK.

Within Schengen, I don't even have to show my ID to get into the transit area or to board the flight.

I never booked Ryan Air and I don't think I ever will. The whole experience sounds just too frustrating.

Funny story on this hidden paid verification Ryanair does.

This is the thing: https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/lp/explore/verification-hub

Basically, you have to download a random third party app and provide some very sensitive data, including filming yourself.

I was once caught by this, even though I actually used Ryanair's site directly. My assumption is that it was due to a Cloudflare/VPN IP, so I might have looked like a bot.

I was pissed, more due to random third party app, vs 50 cents charge, so I decided to bluff and ping their support and start complaining.

I asked them to tell me exactly what caused my purchase to be tagged with this. I demanded I have the right to that data, and quoted things like GDPR and other consumer protection laws (e.g. hidden fees protections). After several layers of random agents sending me around, I got forwarded to some managers and folks with non-support titles (based on LinkedIn), as I kept pushing to get logs and details.

I wanted all data associated with this request, and all third parties that got access to my purchase details, quoting the part of ToS where I allowed for this...

Eventually, they admitted it's a vendor, they don't have details, and use a third party for detection. They said they have a whitelist and added my email to that whitelist so I never get miss-tagged as a bot.

I caved/sold out and didn't push further. I am still pretty annoyed that we are OK with companies doing this. (I understand I'm part of the problem as I ended up flying and only adding a bit of support load to their queue in the end)...

So you only need to do this if you book third party right? If you book direct do you need to do this?

In theory yes, only if you book via third party. But, my example shows there is some automated system that can even tag you for this if you use Ryanair to book directly. E.g. VPNs.

And Ryanair’s “Priority” boarding service just means you get the privilege of standing around on the tarmac in the rain and cold for longer than non-Priority customers.

Other added Priority perks include being stared at disinterestedly from inside the warm, dry aircraft by the cabin crew, and being allowed to bring a bag that every other airline allows you to bring for free.

I can never understand why people pay for Priority boarding! Would you rather stand on a runway/in a gangway tunnel/sit in a plane seat as opposed to sitting in an airport waiting lounge? It absolutely blows my mind.

Most people with priority boarding also queue, standing, at the desk the moment they get to the boarding gate. WHY?! You have a seat already?!

Priority gives you 1 small bag and 1 cabin bag. I pay just so I can take a cabin bag.

But do you try your hardest to be first onto the plane?!

Sometimes, if only because recently, Ryanair has "overbooked" for their actual cabin bag capacity, forcing you to place your bag below deck if you're one of the last ones.

I find the whole thing despicable, but the behavior is rational (according to the rules Ryanair set up, at least).

Fun fact: if you book priority, but then only take a backpack on the plane, they won't let you put it in the overhead compartment.

True, and they can be very rude about it ;(

The only reason I do it is because if you get on the plane last, there may not be any room for your bag in the overhead compartment near you.

> None of the other low cost airlines are this bad.

Have you heard of WizzAir? They're the only airline that have a flight landing close to my parent's city, so I have to fly with them to avoid an extra car ride that's as long as the flight.

They have this thing where, if they detect you searching for flights repeatedly from the same account / device, they impose an "administrative fee" for each passanger, for each flight, because presumably you're a robot. There is no way to get rid of said fee, unless you call them (for £1.5 per minute or so), and even that might take ages. And this isn't like £0.5, it's £8 per person, per flight.

I can only hope they go bankrupt and someone else takes that flight slot.

I actually appreciate Ryanair for being transparently money grabbing because you consistently know what you're getting every time. They're very reliable and you can mentally budget in what you'll have to deal with.

Airlines like Lufthansa, United, etc for me are much worse.

I love that it's so unreliably trustworthy that it winds up being, in a way, trustworthy.

Also Ryanair is the only thing keeping all the nationally subsidized airlines even somewhat honest when it comes to pricing. If they didn't exist, flying would be significantly more expensive. Glad they're here.

> If they didn't exist, flying would be significantly more expensive.

Surely, flying was significantly more comfortable before Ryanair!

I wouldn't know, I could never afford it!

Actually I'm pretty sure that's lack of tax on jet fuel and all the ridiculous taxpayer funded subsidies that airlines get that keeps prices low.

Its crazy that in the UK the train is like £100 but a flight can be had for £20. Utterly corrupt. Bonkers.

Is that like saying the Nazis are preferable over the Soviets because they are more consistently evil?

Fwiw, i disagree 100%.

I recall a pattern they used to use, probably illegal, when paying for a flight quoted in a foreign currency. Ryanair would "helpfully" offer for you to pay in your own currency with their awful exchange rate, with the option to instead pay in the advertised foreign currency (thus making use of your credit card's exchange rate - typically the market rate) on a pop-up only visible if you click the tiny "more information" link made to look like terms and conditions. The opt-out was not even on the same page, invisible to anyone but those most alert to these tricks. That probably netted them a good 10% extra margin on 95% of sales through deception. Disgraceful behaviour.

Paypal does this as well.

They'll convert to your card's currency automatically and the option to revert is hidden behind an inconspicuous "See other currency options" prompt

So, if you buy a ticket (in a foreign currency) with RyanAir and you pay via PayPal, you'll need to choose NOT to use the currency converter twice!

IIRC they even use multiple different wordings and layouts for this dialogue, depending on what "mode" of Paypal you're using (e.g. if it's a pop-up or if it's a full page redirect; I dunno how to describe it technically). I have to use it a lot and even I've been tricked a few times. It's literally theft and I can't believe they get away with it

Damn, I didn't know this, that's insane. I've been paying with the converted currency for ages. Thanks for sharing.

PayPal once quietly added my European card (EUR zone) as USD. And when I paid for a product in EUR, it "thoughtfully" (for them) converted the amount twice using their special currency exchange rate.

You can't do without airports and airlines, but why PayPal still exists in 2024 - I don't understand.

>You can't do without airports and airlines, but why PayPal still exists in 2024 - I don't understand.

What don't you understand? In the US, the party that says "the government should not interfere with business" wins a lot of elections and the party that says "the government should protect consumers from corporate harm" wins way fewer elections.

So we have almost no consumer protections, so it's largely not illegal or risky for a business to fuck over their consumers which is very profitable so most businesses fuck over their consumers in various ways.

Yeah it's the US's fault if a corporation misbehaves in Europe. It's so sad that Europe cannot legislate or do anything about it. PayPal is just inevitable I guess. Wait no, Europe is more than capable of doing that but they don't care about it either. Hence why they also don't do anything against Ryanair. Oops!

What does this have to do with the government? My point was that PayPal is terrible and why is there no widely used alternative to it? I know there are alternatives, but usually only about 5 people use them. And somehow in Germany (and it seems in the US too) everyone still uses PayPal.

>why PayPal still exists in 2024

Because they have a ton of users. People who don’t have credit card numbers saved on autofill so PayPal is more convenient. People also think it’s safer because the website doesn’t see your card number

I struggle to see how it is convenient. At least on Android, when you pay for something, it doesn't use the installed app, but makes you login in the browser. And they still don't support 2FA or Passkeys properly, making me to receive an SMS almost every time.

I can't answer that because I rarely use paypal myself. In fact they banned one of my two accounts (personal, business) for using gift cards which makes me uninterested in using the other one more than once a year.

That aside, I've seen many normal people use it for the reasons I described: They don't want to type in their card number and they think it's unsafe to type in their card number. It's (literally) all in their head so don't think too hard about it.

The practical alternative is Apple Pay, but you can't use it on Android.

This infuriates me because it’s automatic if a merchant has “fast checkout” enabled.

Also seen on Booking.com.

Part of the broader Dynamic Currency Conversion scam, also found in person etc. Not as common as it used to be but when travelling I had to be quite forceful in stating I want to pay in $LocalCurrency . I've had many establishments ignore my request, select GBP, then hand me the terminal asking for my pin, then feigning ignorance when I explain that they are trying to cheat me

The differences involved make money if you are talking about the whole population but for an individual payment it's a relatively small difference. I'm not sure what would motivate someone handing you a card reader to try to cheat you - they can't possibly be making any money out of it.

> I'm not sure what would motivate someone handing you a card reader to try to cheat you

Immense pressure from their boss?

The first few times I let it go, wanting to believe an honest mistake, but when it started happening so frequently, I realised _someone_ in the chain is trying to scam me.

Anyone below an international corporation isn't getting cut in on the benefits. Maybe the big hotels and car rental (being large enough for the card companies to negotiate such a thing with in addition to having a significant enough percentage of foreign card transactions) services would see some benefit from that but I don't think most places would care.

There is always the other side that, although it's not a competitive exchange rate, at least you know the exact amount in your home currency. Also, I never remember which cards have foreign currency fees so it is a bit of a wash.

I can’t imagine the merchant gets that extra currency conversion money, nor why they’d care, they are still getting the exact same amount in their local currency while it’s their bank who profits on the arbitrage.

This is becoming more and more common. Originally I saw it only at sketchy ATMs but it is now nearly ubiquitous in many places. Sites like Amazon and even POS systems at restaurants and grocery stores now try the same trick.

It ought to be illegal, in fact it ought to be retroactively illegal and these companies should be forced to refund any money they've made this way. It's just a pure money grab from confused customers.

This is every other ATM in Prague (euronet is the name I think), they helpfully convert it for you with like 30% markup. These people (and the lawmarkers that permit this) should be publicly flogged.

Virtually all banks in Prague offer this (extremely expensive) convenience.

What pisses me even more off is that most ATMs charge an additional fee for their usage. The exception being KB (Societe Generale) and Raiffeisenbank.

I see this all over the place and I've by now learned to always answer "no" if anybody offers currency conversion. It's sometimes difficult, because some terminals will only show you a choice of currencies, and you have to remember to pick the local currency (local to the store you are paying in) and let your bank do the conversion at their (terrible) rates, rather than pay a 10% markup.

Same here. I often write down the converted sum and then reject conversion. Later I compare my notes with the the conversion done my bank issue the credit card.

It was always so that my bank was cheaper, until very recently when it would have been to opposite way for the first time. Both my banks have recently raised their conversion fees, I think they are now 2.3% - 2.5%.

That still sounds better than the exorbitant fees some dodgy businesses are charging. I don't know whether it was a rare exception that the bank was more expensive or whether it becomes more common.

How is this any different than banks that charge outrageous fees for converting currencies, or heck even currency retail brokers in high traffic tourist destinations.

Most banks charge a lot less for their customers. In this era of debit/credit cards that convert automatically, offering to do a currency conversion at a higher fee than basically any bank, and relying on customers to be not savvy enough to know that is scammy.

Unfortunately common practice across a few industries. Ryanair has been doing this for a while (and still do).

Ryanair are what they are. The reason every flight is so cheap in Europe is because of them. They've never pretended to be anything else other than a budget airline where any extras or conveniences will cost you extra. I've literally just checked in with an EasyJet flight and it's exactly the same patterns everywhere. Every other airline copied RyanAir because most passengers are highly price sensitive. The problem is that they're still not as cheap.

The 'not printing a boarding ticket' before you travel and being charged for it at the airport has been around since 2009: https://theguardian.com/money/2009/may/14/ryanair-online-che... so it's hard for people to feign ignorance of it.

> The 'not printing a boarding ticket' before you travel and being charged for it at the airport has been around since 2009

That does not mean it is acceptable.

Treating passengers in a respectable civilised manner should be a given. Quite why we have sunk to thinking such shenanigans are acceptable will continue to puzzle me. If any other business tried this, you would tell them to swivel.

What's so difficult about checking in with the app? I found the situation pretty painless and you can go straight to security that way, if you don't have to check in any luggage.

> What's so difficult about checking in with the app?

You <------> My point

Simply put; what is so difficult about not adding excessive charges to passengers? And why are you trying to justify this?

It is difficult because having attendants print boarding cards or working with an airport to maintain ticket printers costs money that eats into their margins and increases prices. It's not like they don't warn you that checking in at the airport is paid. I'd much rather save 1€ and check in the way I usually would, even if it means someone who can't read a few warnings has to pay a fee.

Other airlines add excessive charges too, they just put it in the face value of the fare.

Ryanair don’t have anywhere near as many staff at check in, ergo, it’s a cost they save. It’s not excessive, it’s an incentive to do it as they suggest online and keep their costs and thus the total cost of flying down.

The old-school airlines never swindle you and they're still around. I'd much rather avoid a few dark patterns and save a significant cost of my ticket, and it seems like most of Europe agrees.

> Treating passengers in a respectable civilised manner should be a given

Then pay more for an airline that provides that.

The RyanAir deal is pretty straight-forward: you will be treated like subhuman cattle, and in exchange you will have very low prices. They optimize many things to save costs, including having less staff for things like printing boarding tickets. They're fairly up-front about it and in general it's a fair deal. Whether you personally like that deal is a different matter.

I'd kinda agree if it didn't include actively trying to scam me for extra money. It's not about them saving cost anymore, it's about them trying to trick customers for extra money against their will.

I like it. Or at least I like flying to Lisbon for £40 return.

I've never been treated like a subhuman on Ryanair. I have been treated like cattle.

Except they actively try to scam you for money.

I don't know if that design is around, but they would have the option to add extra carry on (not luggage). The image would be of something that clearly looks like luggage, and next to it a tiny tiny backpack.

If you read the wording carefully, you'd notice that this is just for carry on. You have to scroll down to the bottom of the page, select a submenu and there you can finally see the option to add luggage. That's straight up scammy.

People are very (and possibly irrationally) price sensitive to airline costs, so they are willing to put up with a lot compared with many other goods/services.

Strong disagree, there are other low cost airliners that have massively better user experience, not because they are stellar, its just that ryanair is rock bottom slump of shite and they often make you feel it when using them.

These days, even ie Swiss airlines often offer comparable prices for same routes. No free food or drinks, yet you are still treated like a human being with a speck of respect.

The difference though is that Swiss' coverage is only from Switzerland, a very wealthy and well-managed country, to other major business and tourist destinations and can arguably run at a loss since it's a national carrier. Not every country can afford that - the only flights I can get from my small hometown of ~350000 are with budget airlines because the national carrier simply isn't competitive enough to be able to run profitable flights from there. Before they showed up the airport was effectively dysfunctional. Budget airlines have tremendously improved connectivity for less popular and less wealthy of the continent.

Not disagreeing here, not at all. And don't overestimate how well organized Switzerland is.

Our closest airport (Geneva) is much better served by Easyjet than its own Swiss airlines, who have top priority Zurich and then nothing for a looooong time. They are absolutely uncompetitive here, almost no direct flights and you need to fly 200km and change in Zurich (so adding risks and flights take 2-3x longer, sucks with small kids), compared to Easyjet who offers direct flights to tens of destinations on 3 continents for comparable or lower prices.

Not sure when was the last time I flew Swiss, few years ago. Easyjet? 4x this year, once to Africa. But this is about Ryanair, for some reason they positioned themselves as the worst budget airlines and they don't even fight their image. Suffice to say, I've never flown them.

The reason is because the EU deregulated in 1992. Ryanair didn't invent low cost (that South West airline from 1949 can claim that I believe) and they also had serious competition from EasyJet, a low cost competitor, amongst others. If the EU didn't deregulate they would not have got very far.

Yes Ryanair are victors these days but let's not rewrite history

Ryanair is not straight forward, it's tricksy and only cheap if you hit the magic set of conditions that let you get the cheap deals at the cheap times.

What people object to is not the no frills concept but the

"ahaha you didn't opt for <insert obscured choice> so now you have to pay an extra €20 would you like to pay in GBP? That will £40 please or you're not getting on the flight home.

p.s. Our cabin bags are ever so slightly smaller than the standard every other airline uses and if yours don't fit it will another €50 surcharge."

situation.

I am lucky not having to fly with them since 2006 or so. I would only ever visit their web site if I am completely desperate and there is absolutely no other alternative transportation and I must travel

> They've never pretended to be anything else other than a budget airline where any extras or conveniences will cost you extra

This part is not objectionable - it's the lack of transparency and attempts to trick you into paying additional fees that are worse than normal. Take booking.com as a comparison. They are very up front about costs and your expected costs for a stay booked via them will normally match up with what you see on the checkout costs and your actual final costs. That isn't the case for Ryanair

> The 'not printing a boarding ticket' before you travel and being charged for it at the airport has been around since 2009: https://theguardian.com/money/2009/may/14/ryanair-online-che... so it's hard for people to feign ignorance of it.

Everyone has a first time travelling with Ryanair and some number of them will fall into this trap because they didn't know. This would be fine if people were intentionally making the choice to trade off the inconvenience (?) of checking in online vs at the airport but what % of people paying that fee did that? It would be easy for Ryanair to provide a more transparent customer experience here.

I don't use Ryanair specifically but these patterns are commonly found on all other discount airlines, and even some regular airlines as well.

One particularily devious example is when you log into WizzAir's website, the check box under the login (which takes your email and password) is not "Remember me", but rather "Subscribe me to marketing emails".

Always takes me a moment not to select it.

Oh, Australia's Kogan -- a wannabe Amazon -- has you beat there.

When you buy anything, you're back on the list. No questions. No option. No chance of not being. You just are.

And it's a really aggressive list. An email a day, minimum.

I've switched to Amazon, and it's nicer. What does that tell you.

Thanks for the warning for when I return to Australia.

Wait till you see what happened to Dick Smith.

https://www.dicksmith.com.au/da/shop/?q=shoes

It's just a Kogan skin. As is Matt Blatt, formerly furniture. Really weird.

Is this not illegal in Australia?

Probably. I don’t think they care.

https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2021/kogan-spam-draws--310-800...

Is Amazon bad? I bought a headphone from Amazon, which has just arrived in Sweden. Before that, I used almost every service for delivery here and they were ALWAYS terrible. They said 3 to 5 business days for delivery, and it took 6 business days. Every time. When they had the 1 to 2 days option (which was rare, and when they did it was expensive), it would never come within that timeframe either. I checked some Terms and Conditions and apparently they were within the law because they're allowed a few extra days due to unforeseen circumstances.

That's why I tried Amazon this time. For a small fee, they had "next day delivery". I tried it. God damn it worked! The very next morning my item was ready for pick up at the nearby grocer.

Signing up was extremely easy and to my amusement, they had the lowest price as well. I don't know, but so far I am thinking Amazon is very much the best in the business. I am extremely surprised they managed to be so efficient even in Sweden, despite every workplace regulation making efficiency a very difficult, if not impossible, goal to achieve.

He is saying that Kogan want to be Amazon in Australia, and that Kogan has many dark patterns, not that Amazon is itself bad.

Though I do agree that Amazon was better when it was just a book retailer and not an example marketplace site for AWS.

This sounds like it both should and would land them on every anti-spam system's shitlist.

WizzAir is even worse than Ryanair with dark patterns in my experience. Super annoying.

This is like a very regressive tax policy. If you are high capability individual, you will sail through these screens and avoid adding extra charges, if you are a ... low capability individual, you won't be able to do that, and you end up subsidising the travel of those smarter than you.

It's not a matter of intelligence, but it's definitely a modern form of "street smarts".

"Series of tubes" smarts

Or for me, a tax for ADHD.

We all pay, you find harder to pay in attention instead of money, but either way it's a cost on society

i end up paying the higher price instead of attention which I do not have. just recently I got given a deliveroo voucher, which I added to my account. there's no way to figure out how much is left at any time, unless you're about to commit to an order. I ordered some food, thinking I'll pay with the free credit - nope, I missed the bit where you have to change the payment option from card to voucher credit.

This is why I have started booking flights for my less tech savvy parents. Theyre terrified of the dark patterns.

As I understand it American medical care is quite similar.

Late stage capitalism isnt much fun. Far too many forms.

I find myself reluctant to go to the doctor, dentist, etc. because I always feel like they're trying to upsell me on some bullshit, or doctors that split treatment into multiple 15 minute visits to squeeze me as much as possible.

> those smarter than you.

That’s such a terrible and unfair take.

Less tech savvy or more busy/tired people are not less smart than you. I can’t believe I actually have to put that in words.

Just wait until GP is retired and old, they will finally garner some sympathy because by then they will themselves be "a ... low capability individual".

I think OP used "..." because he has some sympathy. He could use better word than "smarter", but it is indeed a certain kind of smartness.

I am sure that when I will get old I will become less capable and I am worried about this. Because looking at birth rates and inverted population pyramids around me signify that I will be an old man in the sea of old people. A conman's dream I suppose. It is not that I don't have sympathy saying all this (just as I think OP thinks) for those other people, quite the opposite, because if I will live long enough I will be one of them.

That's a fascinating take. Dark patterns as regressive tax, or equivalently, tech savviness as regressive credit.

Reminds me a bit of this old post: https://putanumonit.com/2018/08/09/jobs-inside-the-api/

The best of Ryanair dark patterns, that is now gone, was on the travel insurance. They forced you to select your country as if insurance was mandatory but you had to go and find the "No insurance" country so you could continue without insurance.

Yes! I was suprised not to see this on the site, but I haven't used Ryanair for years so that explains it's gone.

If anyone is curious, "Don't Insure Me" was located alphabetically in the countries list between Denmark and Finland.

Pro tip: if you want a nice seat on a Ryanair flight, wait with the check-in until shortly before the deadline. Their 'random' seat assignment algorithm gives out the 'bad' seats first, in the hopes of being able to sell the 'better' ones. Only works if the flight is fully booked of course.

Don't wait too long, though. I used to apply the same tactic, but once I missed the deadline by 5 minutes and had to pay €55 per person for check-in at the counter.

Ryanair is not an airline. It is a byzantine bureaucratic game that rewards successful completion with a cheap airline ticket.

Correct. And that game only ends when you step foot at the plane.

I've been on a Ryanair flight where I was first fined for not printing the ticket beforehand (of course printing it at the airport was already too late). Later, during onboarding, all passengers had to measure their trolley at the entrance to the plane in a very slim trolley frame that would not fit any regular trolley, only briefcases. My regularly sized trolley was too big to fit so I was fined again.

all in all, fines cost around twice the price of the ticket.

This was my first (and last) time flying Ryanair. Other passengers on that flight told me that they always get you once, but second time you know how to play the game...

Flying Ryanair definitely requires advanced preparations. That said, their traps are predictable and don't change much year-to-year. If you are aware of them and can prepare yourself, you can get really great bargains when flying around Europe.

Ryanair is the world's safest airline and revolutionised travel within the EU.

The majority of complaints are always like yours, not following the instructions and expecting flag carrier service from a discount airline.

> revolutionised travel within the EU.

In which ways? Apart from the low cost part and making flying utterly miserable now. It's not like he invented a new type of airplane

IMO they just forced other airlines to cut product and service to the bone. A tight, business-savvy guy spent all his waking hours figuring out how to further screw passengers (and continues to do so)

I do wonder if EU261 would have been required without low cost airlines.

> expecting flag carrier service from a discount airline.

Flag Carriers are all low-cost for short/mid haul now (and to an extent long-haul), as they've been dragged in to the gutter by Easyjet and Ryanair

> In which ways? Apart from the low cost part and making flying utterly miserable now. It's not like he invented a new type of airplane

I can only assume that you weren't around for the transition. Intra-EU flights cost multiples of the average industrial week's wages before Ryanair. Air travel was inaccessible or rarely accessible to the vast majority of people in the continent.

Ryanair single-handled brought the cost of European air fares down by two orders of magnitude and became the largest airline in the world by PAX to show for it. It absolutely revolutionised travel within Europe because it made point-to-point flights available to everyone, even the low-waged and students heading away for a city break with €20 return flights.

> A tight, business-savvy guy spent all his waking hours figuring out how to further screw passengers (and continues to do so)

And yet PAX love Ryanair, as evidenced by the ticket sales even though they love to complain. After all, for most people, the choice isn't between low-cost and full-service carriers. It's between low-cost carriers and not flying at all.

> Flag Carriers are all low-cost for short/mid haul now (and to an extent long-haul), as they've been dragged in to the gutter by Easyjet and Ryanair

Another perspective that's a lot closer to the truth is that Ryanair forced them to compete on price and actually serve the public which their flag purports to represent, but which the flag carriers completely ignored for most of their history.

Two orders of magnitude?! You are claiming that flights that now cost 100€ used to cost 10,000€?

Not all of them but I have flown between destinations for 10€ shortly after Covid that were easily between 300-400€ on old-school airlines 15 years ago. While those are exceptions there are cases where budget airlines even with all the bells and whistles are still substantially cheaper than legacy carriers.

In any defense of Ryanair, it's an absolute given that someone will quote 10 EUR flights (it's always 10 EUR/GBP), as if it were the norm

The average Ryanair fare is €27 (1).

In 1990, Aer Lingus began "special reduced" fares for Dublin-London at IR £199 or €252 in 1990 money or €531 accounting for inflation. Today that's available from €15 with Ryanair, a reduction of 97%. Not quite two orders of magnitude, but not far off either.

The same story plays out on every legacy city pair, but when you start to include smaller cities which prior to Ryanair never had direct flights to anywhere other than their regional hub (if that), then the price difference can be closer to three orders of magnitude.

Overall, I think you and the other commenter are seriously underestimating the effect that Ryanair had on the European aviation.

(1): https://www.statista.com/statistics/1125265/average-ticket-p...

Okay. That's an order of magnitude. I'll buy that.

Although, RyanAir really just moved the total price behind an opaque scheme of fees. People rarely pay 15€ total.

If we could see the average revenue per customer, I bet the reduction would be more like 50%. And they have decreased the quality of the experience of flying by far more than that.

I already conceded the cost point so I'll skip over all of that. I won't deny flying used to be expensive

> Two orders of magnitude

Haha, that's a good one. I've read quite a few threads on the topic of old ticket prices on the BA FlyerTalk forum, and people with actual old tickets from and good memories of the 80s and 90s quote prices not so extreme (while still perhaps expensive by today's standards). Ryanair didn't invent competition

> single-handedly

Erm, EasyJet?

> love Ryanair

they love traveling but hate Ryanair

> I can only assume that you weren't around for the transition

I was

> It absolutely revolutionised travel within Europe

I wish the revolution was in rail. I don't think Ryanair et al has been a net benefit for society

> and people with actual old tickets from and good memories of the 80s and 90s quote prices not so extreme

Adjusted for inflation?

> Erm, EasyJet?

EasyJet was pretty much a fast-follower, arguably; same business model, but slightly later.

Every time I flew with Ryanair it's been because the price difference has been on orders of magnitude, or at least a difference of hundreds of euros. If it wasn't for the price, why would anybody choose to fly with a worse experience?

> I can only assume that you weren't around for the transition. Intra-EU flights cost multiples of the average industrial week's wages before Ryanair. Air travel was inaccessible or rarely accessible to the vast majority of people in the continent.

That's not true. Otherwise you'd be gouged on every route not served by Ryan Air, which is definitely not the case.

Have they pushed prices down? Arguably, yes. But not by orders of magnitude.

> Otherwise you'd be gouged on every route not served by Ryan Air, which is definitely not the case.

Are there many routes not served by one of Ryanair/Easyjet/Wizzair? (The other two are on the Ryanair model).

> But not by orders of magnitude.

Looks like in 1980 a flight from Dublin to London was about 150-200 Irish pounds. 150 pounds is 189 euro without inflation, but factoring in inflation, 150 Irish pounds in 1980 is 899 euro today (easy to forget how much inflation there was in the 80s). While the Crowdstrike thing is currently stopping me from checking prices, Ryanair to Gatwick is usually like 30-50 euro these days. So that's an order of magnitude, anyway.

And Dublin to London is probably close to a best-case; it's short, and it was always a relatively busy route served by multiple flag carriers. Many routes would have been single-carrier. If you wanted to fly, say, Dublin to Athens back then, well, you probably weren't doing it direct, for a start, and it'd cost you a small fortune.

To me it seems disingenuous to only compare prices and not what you got as part of the ticket.

I imagine on that old ticket you could: pick up a phone and get help with anything, check luggage for free, take a carry-on for free, check in at the airport, free food/drinks on board, more staff on board, comfier seats, more leg room, could make changes/refund with fewer penalties. Oh and probably much better IRROPs support

If I price up a a Ryanair flight LGW-DUB with roughly some the above included, that's 347 EUR return - https://imgur.com/FPkbdec.png (I accounted £20 for drinks + food). (You can also get a LHR-DUB BA Business Class ticket for that!)

Again I concede flying is cheaper these days, but as demonstrated, the original claims of magnitude(s) aren't right, if we make a fairer comparison

You can argue people didn't need all those extra etc but that's a different topic and moving the goalposts

Anyway I suspect a hint of patriotism or profound appreciation for the service they offer is marring these discussions so it's all a bit fruitless

> Apart from the low cost part

Yes, no, that. It used to be extremely expensive to fly.

This thread is about their dark patterns, and this is another example of dark pattern.

You can blame me as much as you want for not reading thoroughly but still, it's an frustrating experience

Ryanair are absurdly upfront about their budget nature. They take the piss out of themselves constantly about it. While I agree they use dark patterns, your comment is not an example of them.

"The instructions" are intentionally byzantine to make sure people make mistakes and then "rightfully" fleece them. It's not just a matter of "less service".

When you book the ticket they make it quite clear that normal sized trolley bags are not included in the cheapest fare. Most LCCs in Europe do something like this nowadays, even some legacies…

Closing online checkin 2 hours before departure and then charging lots for airport checkin is crazy though.

I heard/read somewhere from some Stewardesses on those budget airlines that even though people get angry about being charged those additional costs, that they claim they will never fly again, that they actually continue flying repeatedly with the same budget airline. I think the term used was "hate flying", that you hate the extra charges you get but continue to fly because it is the cheapest.

You can avoid all those charges by simply playing their game.

Minimal luggage, no extra crap like speedy boarding or so, be prepared to forfait the money if you change plans (change of flight is usually horrendously expensive) and alway print / mobile app your boarding pass.

I actually don't think they are that bad - you just have to appreciate that when they have a maximum bag size (or some other arbitrary limit) they are entirely serious about it. And if you do break their rules they will try and charge you - but it's pretty easy to work within their rules so not a huge problem if you do some basic preparation.

Which is exactly the parent's point about "bureaucratic game that rewards successful completion with a cheap airline ticket"

But it's not that bad. You need to do research about your travel destination anyways, like how are you going to get around, what places you want to visit, and some basic phrases in the destination language if relevant. Spending an extra 2-3 minutes checking how much stuff you can bring and whether you need any "dark pattern" options shouldn't be too hard in comparison but maybe I expect too much of the average traveller.

I don't expect to have to research the bag sizes every time I fly to the same destination just because Ryanair might have made them ever so slightly smaller.

But they haven't. They only changed them once in the past decade, it's not like it's a thing that budget airlines pull every year. Changing them sucks but it's not really a problem now.

Sorry but you just didn't inform yourself. The dimensions for the luggage are very clearly stated. Nowadays I would expect it to be common knowledge that when flying with a budget airline you have to pay attention to your luggage size and should have the boarding ticket QR code ready. For a small effort you get a small price.

Correct, I did not read carefully which is why I wrote that they usually get you once and then you learn.

But this whole thread is about dark patterns, and this is just an example of another one.

And to be honest, the only way to not pay for your luggage is if you fly VERY light which is only applicable for certain flight scenarios.

Not really, with a little discipline it can work for the vast majority of scenarios. 90% of my flights are backpack only and that includes travel where I needed to be dressed formally and travel with my SO. The only scenarios where it's actually necessary I see is if you need health equipment (which most people don't), if you have toddlers (which I'd argue you shouldn't be flying with anyways), and if you are moving a lot of stuff (where paying for luggage is still cheaper than shipping in many cases).

It just requires a little planning which I think most people my generation and younger are getting used to.

The trick here is soft bags, or weekend bags. Hard bags with wheels always get checked, but soft weekend bags usually can get pushed in no problem. My partner had to pay because her bag fit "correctly" but the wheels did not. So - fair game to them - it didn't fit. Funnily enough, the charge was less than the online advertised price, so we still came out better off.

> her bag fit "correctly" but the wheels did not

This is just ridiculously mean...

> And that game only ends when you step foot at the plane.

Actually, it ends only when you're off the plane at the destination. They continue to try to rinse you of your money on board with scratch cards (gambling), overpriced food and drink and duty free shopping, even making cabin announcements so you remove your headphones to listen thinking it's important.

> Actually, it ends only when you're off the plane at the destination.

Assuming you land at the right destination: https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2006/mar/30/theairlinei...

This is such an exaggeration. I fly with them, wizzair, easyjet etc. at least once a year each and I never have issues - I just press skip on every page that upsells me, same as I do on any other site including Amazon.

Fascinating Aida, "No Such Thing as Flights for 50p" https://youtu.be/ZAg0lUYHHFc?si=KG2Y0r36d6X9bFBE

Speaking of dark pattern, I recently resigned my dropbox sub and they have one of the most user hostile flow I've seen in quite a while, at least on a "legitimate" website. Given that they aim mostly for business and big business now, keeping this thing clearly meant to scare or confuse Random Joe felt very surprising to me.

I'm sure they have lots of numbers showing it's worth it, but I can't help notice that companies who know they are good and you need them tend to have a much easier unsub path, frictionless for many. It doesn't inspire huge confidence and very much confirmed my wish to unsubscribe.

I used to use DropBox quite a bit for file sharing directories of photos. I used to be able to upload them, create a shared link for the directory and just email that link - no need to invite specific people as collaborators, and the space used by the folder wouldn't be deducted from the recipient's quota.

They've since employed every dark pattern in the book to make that flow next-to-impossible, without having technically withdrawn it.

Yesterday they emailed me to say "We've noticed you're not using your DropBox account..."

Unsubscription options can just be awful. I remember being subscription to hbr and to unsubscribe the experience was just so awful, I just never want to subscribe to another news paper ever again.

Similarly I was also giving monthly to the mozilla foundation, and when I wanted to leave they had a bunch of patterns in place to try to stop me, it was just awful.

I hate dark patterns like everybody else, but I have to say that - despite those - the Ryanair website still seems to me one of the best ones for booking a flight.

It might be because I got accustomed to it, but - while you indeed need to decline extra after extra - the overall process seems sufficiently clear and straightforward, and most of all both the website and the app are quick and bug-free (in my experience).

Other airline websites I've used in comparison are much much worse. Finnair, SAS, Swiss (Lufthansa), EasyJet, AirBaltic, LOT... much slower, clunkier, and buggier. (Again, in my experience.)

As for the actual experience of flying with them, of course it's not luxurious, and you need to accept that strictly enforcing their rules is how they can keep their prices down. So I'll go against the grain and say that I have no sympathy for the people that show up at the gate with two oversized bags and make a scene because they're asked to pay for them.

I use "Ryanair check-in experience" to describe naggy interfaces because everyone understands exactly what it means. With my last easyJet flight, I counted the number of times I had to say "no" before I could get the ticket I wanted at the price I was given. It was something like a dozen.

The internet feels like that. Our devices feel like that. Everything feels like that. It's as if the entire world is turning into a Marrakech bazaar with aggressive kiosk owners. We normalised treating users like marks for aggressive sales tactics.

As a teenager I worked at a box store, and I had to keep pushing extended warranties on threat of creative dismissal. I saw how disingenuous pitches changed the relationship with customers from trust-based to adversarial. If this upsell is bullshit, how trustworthy is the actual service?

When I went freelance, I practiced radical honesty, and it worked great. Once people accept that you're honest and on their side, they'll sign blank cheques. Trust is incredibly valuable in an increasingly trustless society.

British Gas no longer prints their bank acc details on the invoices. They want you to create an online account and force you to set up a direct debit, so they can take money directly from their account. Disgraceful behaviour.

Not convinced that that, in and of itself, is a dark pattern.

Now using that to essentially get customers to overpay over the year, feels like it might be. Guess it depends on how much you save with them in the first loads using DD.

You save nothing. There's a manager who needs to show more people switching to online accounts and they want to achieve it by brute force.

You save money when you pay energy bills via monthly direct debit, the direct debit unit rate is slightly cheaper.

https://www.britishgas.co.uk/help-and-support/bills-and-paym... says nothing of the sort.

That page is for their home services (e.g. insurance). For energy it's: https://www.britishgas.co.uk/help-and-support/bills-and-paym...

> Savings: Gas and electricity unit rates are lower if you pay by Direct Debit, saving you £100 in comparison to paying when you get your bill.

This is a fairly common discount to receive from energy suppliers, as direct debit payments have reduced administrative overhead compared to payment on receipt.

Fair enough, but given how crap utilities are at securing user accounts, I do not want to have an account with them. Just send me the invoice and I'll pay it. End of story.

Bills not paid in time is definitely an issue. Having access to charge you when needed reduces the proportion of upaid bills, so you get more money in time.

My experiences with British Gas are infinitely worse than anything Ryanair has done....

Did you know that suppliers like British Gas can randomly assign you to another supplier, without you asking or even being told? And the other supplier has to requirement to ask if you want to be a new customer of theirs?

A colleague from work couldn't move house for a year because they would not accept meter reading. Another has his meter in somebody else's name and BG refuse to transfer it. Their support team in a bunch of ladies in Nigeria (kid you not, when you call them you get a message "please note that it may take a while to connect you to one of our support team" this is played after it's your turn to talk to someone). There are good reasons not to create a user account with them online or allow them free access to your bank account via Direct Debit. They are incompetent and disjointed as an organisation.

I pay them quarterly online with a credit card.

Amazon (at least in Germany) does this if you don’t have prime. 2 clicks are required during the order process just to deny getting prime, and then they still have advertisement for it all over, including on the final page.

They had already pushed me away from prime because of their lack of customer service, but this has made sure I’ll never get it again.

Then when you try to cancel they play word games to say you want to "lose your benefits" not cancel, etc.

Yeah, but at least canceling is only something I had to do once.

Tip: Decline when they first prompt you about choosing luggage options. They will ask again later in the booking flow, and it will be cheaper. I only ever book cabin luggage with Ryanair and it worked every single time so far.

IIRC the difference with the first option is that you get seat selection too, but in reality, only amongst the cheapest seats.

I once bought the "fast track" option mentioned in the article for a Ryanair flight. The airport did not have fast track. When I asked for a refund, customer service told me that "it is the customer's responsibility to ensure that fast track is available at the airport they are flying from before purchasing".

Ummmm

They charged you for a service that was not provided. An online small claims court application will sort that out for you in a few minutes. (Presumably they assume you won't bother?)

In Blighty: https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/web/mcol/welcome

Yeah, it was a matter of principle at that point, but fortunately my credit card resolved it for me in less than a day, but the belligerence of Ryanair was stunning.

Unfortunately Ryanair left Frankfurt Airport. They consistently offered flights an order of magnitude cheaper than other airlines and I could reach Frankfurt airport directly by bus for free with my student ticket. This was the ideal way to go on vacation for me. I don't mind clicking "no thanks" a few times when it saves me 500 euros.

I have to say having used Ryanair a couple of times in the last year - it’s not all that bad. In fact I’d say the booking experience and UX of the site is a lot better than many of their competitors.

As long as you pay attention and read the information given to you - and check in via the app - then it’s smooth sailing. The flights (on my route) are so cheap, that upgrading everything (best seats, priority boarding, fast track etc) is still about a third of the price sometimes of flying with other operators without any hand luggage.

I always wonder about the people that implement this.

They surely know what they're doing, so, do they literally have meetings openly discussing where to put buttons to trick people? Am I just naive in thinking that's insane?

It's a cheap airline. Being slightly adversarial can still be worth the price for customers. As a customer I treat booking it a pretty low-stakes adversarial game and try to enjoy the deviousness. Worst case scenario is costs the same as a flight with a more normie airline. (I'm Irish, as is Ryanair, which may be a factor in my fondness ). Anyway, I guess the devs/designers are also playing the same game, just on the other side.

I'm guessing it works. You piss off the younger poorer generation, whilst capitalizing on the confused older generation with far more cash

yeah, I guess it works because it exists, but I want to understand the mindset of the developers. Are they open about what they're doing or is there some cognitive dissonance where they manage to justify it?

> I always wonder about the people that implement this.

In my experience behind that curtain, it's not the developers, it's the marketing and sales people. Yes, they have such meetings, then they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to explain to the developers why that particular approach is "necessary," while the developers try to explain that jumping through three hoops cannot possibly be simpler (to implement or use) than jumping through a single hoop.

i literally had one such person come to me one afternoon and say, "we need you to add such-and-such to the website, but do it in such a way that we can remove it quickly if needed because it's not entirely kosher and our competitors will report it as soon as one of them sees it." When i asked why they bother to do it the answer was (i kid you not), "because we expect to make more money through this than we will have to pay in the resulting fines."

No joke.

i told him no, i wouldn't knowingly participate in that (and i knew that my boss would back me up, so wasn't concerned about my job), so he went to some other guy who wasn't as stubborn and talked him into it.

> i told him no, i wouldn't knowingly participate in that (and i knew that my boss would back me up, so wasn't concerned about my job), so he went to some other guy who wasn't as stubborn and talked him into it.

This is the big problem with standing your ethical ground in software: They'll just find someone else who has no ethical standard to do it. One of my first programming jobs was writing graphics card drivers, and I was asked to write code to cheat a benchmark (basically detect the benchmark was running and send the code into an alternate faster path). I was a junior developer at the time, but I worked up the courage to refuse to do it, thinking I'll probably be fired. Boss said "Hey, no problem, we'll give you other tickets to work on. Bob, over there said he has no problem writing the benchmark-cheating code!" So a lone voice of ethics is never going to change things when the company itself is unethical.

Funnily enough the buses/taxis/trains page in the checkout does actually hold a brilliant deal. You can get a National Express coach return to/from Stansted for about half the price that they sell it for on their own website, and it's needed too because Stansted Express trains are a ridiculously expensive monopoly.

On the plus side if you are good at navigating the patterns Ryanair can be very cheap and the flights usually get you from A to B reasonably efficiently and on time.

I've used them loads of times and it's usually fine. Occasionally I get stung by something and extra charges like not checking in on time or misreading the baggage regs. Or changing my return date which is not really a dark pattern but often expensive. (sort of a dark pattern - the flights can be like £10 if you book ahead but if you need to delay your flight a day at the last minute you'll find they've gone to £200)

At least it's still possible to book over website. Wizzair disabled searching and booking over web browser with permanent "System maintenance". You're forced to use their mobile app, and always update the app to the latest version, and of course today their app shat itself.

I just flew aer lingus and ryanair and both charged you to pick seats - but we didn't pay. Both flights were almost empty. Aer lingus algorithm gave our party an empty row each. Ryanair algorithim put us sitting next to strangers, surrounded by empty rows/seats.

I think it's related to the business culture in Ireland. Interacting with local businesses here, they don't seem to have any problems with ripping you off. Irish people don't complain enough. Also there's no enforcement of the law. Ryanair gets brought to account by the British CAA (civil aviation authority) now and again because of it's dodgy practices never by the Irish one. Government has told it's regulators to have a soft touch on businesses so that the country is attractive to foreign companies.

I got so angry with Ryanair's website experience that I'm now routinely paying >100% premium with other airlines to avoid having to deal with it. Off the top of my head:

- They make it sound as if you _have_ to choose a seat (and pay for that choice), to avoid this you must find a tiny text link (not button) somewhere hidden on the page

- All the worst/most expensive options pre-selected for you

- Randomly changing the saliency of the options that give you choice between premium (additional fee) choices and free choices; so that you'll almost certainly accidentally include an add-on you didn't want

- Dynamic pricing that changes depending on whether you've seen the page before etc.

- Ridiculous baggage policies/completely opaque costs for additional luggage depending on where and when you decide to add it to your booking

- At the checkout page, the currency/payment UI is so broken that I regularly had to go into browser devtools and send requests by hand just so I could complete a booking. Also currency exchange scam.

- Clicking on "search" (or was it "book"?) automatically accepts their shitty terms and conditions for you even if you don't click on the checkbox, which is probably illegal

I'm sure there were much more.

Frontier airlines literally wouldn't let me check in to my flight back without paying 25$, I would just get a loading bar if I didn't select a seat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIw5WlBZ-ds

I tried every trick in the book, but in the end only dev console could save the day. It was a null reference exception on not buying a bundle...

My major complaints are different:

- their country selector fails if it's not already set to the correct country. It is totally broken, as you might select something, and the result is another, or none at all. So sometimes it doesn't change the selection, at all, not until you've selected another random country first, after that it suddenly does respond to the needed country. This is enough to sometimes just give up.

But in fairness I always blame the folks from this site, and the sorry state of our profession! That's you folks, who have been corrupted to work for the highest bidder only, and never take out the trash! So we stand on an ever increasing pile of trash. Because as a collective we waste our time building, for example, linux, while it is an anachronistic piece of software, irrelevant. Shitware. We are quite autistic, as we place ourselves outside of society. We act like victims instead of citizens that work and wish for their environment to improve. Inevitably it doesn't appreciate us. It pushes the imposter syndrome.

- The seat becomes very uncomfortable over time. It seems the foam has degraded and lost its elasticity due to overuse. Bone on metal.

- There is no head rest for people that are above the median. So you see many, many people just giving up and resting their head on the seat in front of them.

But I like certain other things: no magazines, no security leaflets, no mess, the no nonsense execution.

The website is something I can solve myself, as they have not started to randomize the answers and the colors yet ;-)

All airlines have the same problems: the security theater, the over-crowding, the waiting, the air conditioning, the on-boarding, the lack of liquidity of the tickets (please let me sell the ticket or swap it). It's crap and Ryanair does at least as well as others. In fact I may even prefer dark patterns when the site works well otherwise.

Ryanair ... just recently I went with my 3 kids with them. I did a mistake in paying an adult ticket for my oldest son instead of teenager ticket. This small mistake made it impossible to do the checkin online. It was impossible to correct this mistake online, they referred to customer support which I was not able to reach at all despite many attempts. So I decided to do the checkin at the airport instead. After waiting around 30 minutes in the line I explained them why I was not able to do the checkin online. They then spent 25 MINUTES trying to solve the mistake, she had to make 3 phone calls and get help from her manager to try to change the ticket from adult to teenager. Of course I had to pay €30 per person for doing the checkin at the counter instead of online. I made it in time but the line at the checkin grew a lot as everyone was waiting to solve the issue. So stupid.

I think that the customers who regularly fly low cost airlines understand the game being played here.

In the US we have the same situation with Spirit and Frontier.

If you’re well-informed you can fly for an incredibly low price on low cost airlines.

These low cost airlines punish customers who cost the airline in their biggest costs like labor and fuel. And, yes, they upsell on unnecessary upgrades.

One person’s dark pattern is another person’s opportunity to save.

I once met a guy on a Spirit flight who was taking his first flight ever to visit family where he’d normally drive an incredibly long distance to get there, but because the flight was so affordable he could cut his travel time. I don’t think he cared that the website had dark patterns because he couldn’t fly on a traditional airline as it was cost-prohibitive.

You certainly can’t be booking a flight through their site with your guard down.

The only positive of their site is that it actually works. I am always shocked that so many airline sites globally break, making it difficult to give them your money

This is after all the airline which inspired following musical number: https://youtu.be/FLoHL2O04aI?si=eNqNBRrbSQ_INQYy

Reminds me of how Aeroflot, the Russian national airline, would sneak an insurance into your booking at the very last step, even if you skip right past all the additional steps (hotels, car rental, other bullshit) in the sidebar. They would "accidentally" add it to your order and you have to actively click "remove" to not throw several hundred rubles away. It's almost like they know that no person in their right mind would buy their "insurance for the duration of flight" so they have to push it like that because someone worked hard for that partnership.

Just yesterday:

Collection of Dark Patterns and Unethical Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40993389 - Jul 2024 (70 comments)

This screenshot is a real eye opener: https://hallofshame.design/content/images/size/w1000/2022/07...

So, if you want a check-in bag, you pay almost 50% more than the "value" price, and if you want the same level of service as with "legacy" airlines (except "fast track through security"), you pay almost double?

You can buy a check-in bag as a seperate, standalone purchase. You don't have to buy their 'plus' ticket tier.

Interesting thread, with half of the complaints different from my experience. But I also put my bag in the overhead without paying for anything but the most basic ticket, so who knows.

Funny dark pattern that I found: When checking in on the app, they have copy&paste disabled. Hence, I need to enter booking code and email address manually. I next expect them to make the booking code longer (its only 6 characters), or reset when leaving the app, so that even more people fail at this task.

Yes. I stopped flying RA after a problematic experience booking.

I find all airline bookings never work first time - usually three, four or five attempts are required.

RA bury deeply the option for automatic currency conversion at their extremely high rates, which is active by default.

On a third or so attempt to book, I managed to miss turning that off, and was accordingly ripped off, despite my explicit wish not for it happen.

If a company is actively, knowingly and willingly harming you, it's time to walk away.

I feel like this is the first time the author has booked a flight. These patterns are everywhere from car rental agencies to flights to hotel bookings.

Here’s the “table of fees”: https://www.ryanair.com/us/en/useful-info/help-centre/fees

One interesting ones that I was curious about ua the “infant fee”. Though I can’t see what exactly that is for.

Is that only if you want to put the infant in the overhead bin?

You don't pay for the ticket for infant, just a flat fee since infant doesn't take an extra seat but sits on parent's lap and uses special seat belt clipped into parent's one.

Which can end up being more expensive than regular ticket on rock bottom prices. Every airline has this up to 2 years, some actually charge more so that situation above becomes quite frequent.

I’ve never flown on any airline that charges for a lap infant. I don’t think the concept exists yet in the USA, even on budget carriers.

Who says Europe doesn’t innovate?

Recently I booked a ticket on Ryanair. To validate my account I had to turn on my camera, hold my ID card, then do a bunch of things the machine asked me, like spin my head to the left, etc. Next-level reverse-Turing test there. It really felt like my computer-master was making fun of me by giving me silly instructions. Computers were a mistake, I guess.

When dealing with Ryanair you just have to consider them hostile and duplicitous and set your expectations accordingly in advance.

> Ryanair is a prime example of a company that employs various manipulative techniques, known as "dark patterns," to increase its profits.

You can say "to increase its profits" about anything a company does. The problem with using dark patterns isn't the profit motive. The problem is it's coercing people through deception.

Is it bad that all these patterns seem pretty normal to me?

Though I think that last one was pretty ingenious — when they listed the price of the cheapest option as $78.76 but compared it to the markup of the other pricier options as $28.21, $37.81 etc.

Ryanair is stupidly cheap. They probably don't make any money on the basic flight.

Though a lot of people honestly believe every Ryanair flight is £10 and that's not even remotely true

Are there any examples of white hat hackers or similar fighting against stuff like this? Too much cyber harm is done to benign businesses and people already, so I wonder if there's ever some "for a good cause".

Some sort of browser extension that make users aware of the dark patterns would be interesting. As I write this I remember reading about one that removes them from booking.com:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/bookingcalm/lihgcic...

If I had the anger, starting such a project would be interesting. If they start applying counter-measures (like randomizing CSS classes, like Zuckbook does), one can smile in glee that they're spending money paying some developer to fight you.

Ultimately, I think the answer to this kind of customer abuse is for customers to avoid companies that do this, but as far as I know, all the airlines attempt to trick their customers.

I never booked Ryanair because of that reason

with budget airlines failing in NA, it is interesting to still hear about european ones still thriving because of geographical advantages.

it is a miracle that they are able to cope with high fuel prices and major airports feeling they are owed dollars for every dime made. but in the end it is just an illusion of low-cost. when the ticket's lowest far is 40 and you charge 46 for a cabin bag, might as well make the base fare 80 and call it a day?

They do something very pernicious when displaying the price of extra options for return flights.

Instead of showing you the total price for the return flight, they show you the price of the option on the cheapest leg of the flight. So for example, if an option cost $10 on the outbound flight, $15 inbound flight, instead of displaying $25 total or $12.5 on average, they display "From $10 per flight". You'd expect to pay $20 but end up paying $25.

Legacy airlines do this too. “Upgrade to business class from $100!” Turns out it’s $100 for your random short connecting flight, and $2000 for your main flight.

Meanwhile: the Ryanair app actually works, unlike many others.

EasyJet App is slop, the BA app is total shite.

Maybe it works, because through the app they are clable to collect much more data about you?

I'll never let companies like Ryanair execute code on my devices. I don't care how well it works.

how much data are they supposed to be collecting from inside an android app that basically takes a credit card payment and displays a QR code?

Ryanair at one point at least had their margins such that every penny a passenger spends other than the ticket was profit, so they actually have less incentive to do this than some of the other carriers.

I'm no Ryanair fanboy but they do have the best tech, no denying. Everything just works. EasyJet website/tech seems stuck in the year 2005

Another rather minor thing is that if you look at the source of their confirmation emails, they include a lot of reservation data in XML tags according to the schema.org specification (https://schema.org/FlightReservation). I was looking for a way to parse flight details out of confirmation emails before, and with Ryanair it is trivially easy to do because of this whereas with most other airlines you have to resort to parsing the plaintext or (awful) HTML.

Again, not a big thing but I was surprised that Ryanair seemed to be the only ones who took a standards-based approach to these emails.

That's cool, I had no idea!

The now defunct Inbox from Google used to make use of these XML tags to organise your trips into folders. Wish they'd bring that to gmail.

I'm always kind of surprised when things don't just work.

Like having customers seamlessly interact with a computer is one of the cheapest ways of getting money.

The overtime alone would be a nightmare!

The funny thing is I think they’d have more business if they just made it one (temporarily reversible) click.

This is why we need stronger consumer watchdog groups that can combat this kind of behavior by the corpos.

It's pretty sad that there are developers willing to work on crap like this. Ethics much?

I swear it's only getting worse everywhere.

I agree 100%.

The first time I used it, I paid in the airport for the boarding pass. When I complained that I never paid for in other airline companies, I was told I did not have to pay for it if I read the email they sent me to print it 2 hours in advance.

But I received tons of emails from Ryanair every week before the flight. Advertisement emails which, at some point, I got tired of and stopped reading them: that's how I missed the email in which they asked me to print the boarding pass.

Not to mention that the paragraph in which they mentioned the boarding pass was itself a small portion of a larger advertisement email I still keep in my email inbox.

Ryanair is a great example of the ideology starting in the 1990s that individuals would want to spend every waking moment optimizing the most mundane purchases to save a fraction of a penny.

I hope we will soon get over this nonsense and enjoy a shared understanding that people are terrible at making decisions.

I'm not expecting the UX designers to lead the way here. Education perhaps? Better role models?

Is this site generated by ai? Repeating the same words and making zero points

yandex? Are Yandex employees free to travel around Europe? Interesting.

Of course. The denial rate for schengen visa for Russians hasn't even become lower

Weird, considering there are entire countries that stopped giving them out.

They will always have a safe haven in Germany and Austria.

Yeah, true... There is currently a big anti-EU/Schengen backslash in my state because we can't control entry of Russians that got the visa elsewhere. Which is a problem as we stopped giving them out because they acted as if we were the next in line for invasion.

France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal are giving out the visas in Moscow at a higher rate than they used to in 2020. Some countries are extremely dependent on tourism. Bank accounts are not an issue in the slightest

Oh, but it does matter https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/democracy-and-media/2024/0... Not in the EU, but when you have any property left in Russia.

I mean, the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Among those who can apply to the remaining countries, who can bear the increased costs and shortened validity terms of the non-“simplified” process (and of course the usual 2x markup from the “visa center” rackets that consulates are so keen to force on applicants), and who can figure out a way to arrange a trip without access to their domestic bank accounts (no credit cards thanks to Visa/MC, no currency withdrawals thanks to Putin) or other cheap ways to get foreign currency (good luck figuring out travel medical insurance), the acceptance rates might well be the same as among everybody who went abroad previously.

I don’t know that that’s true, but it would not exactly strain the imagination. It just doesn’t mean what GP appears to imply it means.

Recent Russian regulation automatically closes their domestic bank accounts on the grounds of their internal passports expiring. You can only renew them from inside Russia.

Internal Russian passport "expires" three times during lifetime. For most of the adulthood it's not an issue

Unfortunately, one of these times is at 20, which can be a serious problem for those evading conscription. There have also been recent developments where opposition figures’ passports are cancelled as a persecution measure[1], but it’s too early to tell how widespread it’s going to be.

[1] https://www.currenttime.tv/a/pasporta-rossiyan-za-granitsey-... (in Russian; for reference, Current Time is a US-funded collaboration between Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and Voice of America)

IIRC @yandex.com is the free email domain they offer.

It is. The employee work emails are @yandex-team.ru

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