I’m not sure I would call it a dark pattern, it’s the stated goal of the product. To remove as many expenses as possible, and turn as many things into paid options as they can. They don’t make any effort to hide this and the RyanAir CEO talks about it publicly all the time.

They’re no different from a lot of other budget airlines. The seat pitch is as low as it can go, the seats are cheap and uncomfortable regardless of pitch, and everything other than the seat is a paid extra.

I had to take a reasonably long Air Asia flight last year, and the worst part about it was they woke you up every two hours by turning all the lights on and making a very long announcement that the duty free cart was going to spend the next hour trying to sell liquor and terrible perfume to every passenger.

However on that same flight, one of the paid options was for an incredibly cheap add on that gave you priority checkin, priority boarding, priority immigration, and priority baggage. It was like $10 or something, insanely good value.