Ryanair may increase commission to staff identifying oversized cabin bags
rte.ie
rte.ie
https://www.dublinlive.ie/lifestyle/travel/ryanair-set-recor...
O'Leary is on record as saying that this kind of "bad publicity" story is actually good for the business, because it builds up the Ryanair image that the base price of the tickets is extremely low and keeps them in the minds of potential customers. So I'm always a bit sceptical about how much this kind of story is real vs just a successful attempt to get their brand all across the news for a day...
Personal Experience: last minute ticket from Italy to Germany, major airports, bought the morning for the evening with Ryanair with no luggage: 569€.
What about Eurowings now offering booking of headspace, so that you can guarantee to have the hand lugagge close to your seat?
If anything, I see other airliners getting the same tatics, and I guess we should all be happy they still care about maintenance.
Ryanair has been flying to regional airports near me for the last nearly 30 years.
But a different airport every few years.
What is happening is well documented by the local press who smell a story.
What Ryanair does is approach a small regional airport and offer to fly to it if the landing fees are low enough or even non-existent. And they often try and bundle sharing advertising etc.
Of course this is not great business for the airport. They feel they have to accept something, as it is better than nothing, but it’s not great.
Of course Ryanair doesn’t renew when the contracts are up etc - it has already lined up the next airport.
And the shared marketing? That’s often the banners you see at airports advertising other Ryanair destinations. And the Ryanair marketing budget is insider funny money but the airport contribution is real money …
I had to wait at the gate in the hopes there would be a no show. I wasn't the only one waiting, either. There were two of us. "Good news", they told us after everyone else had boarded. "We have seats for both of you."
They hand-wrote me a ticket and I walked onto the plane, only to find that the seat they'd assigned me was already taken. I stood in the aisle for about 10 minutes, clutching my bags, the only person still standing, until a flight attendant came and told me there wasn't actually a seat for me and that I needed to leave the plane.
Careful what you wish for. I am forced to fly Austrian because on my routes there is nothing else and it's more expensive, always late, in case the flight is cancelled they manage to lose half the rebooking emails etc. And somehow it rubs me the wrong way there is no apology when they lost my baggage or cancelled (already way late) flights.
Ryanair plan for standing-only plane tickets foiled by regulator, 28th February:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/feb/28/ryanair-sta...
Ryanair toilet charge is no joke, insists O'Leary, 5th March:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/mar/05/ryanair-toi...
One of the weirdest ones was him pretending to be a plane along our open plan hallway. Still don't understand what that was about.
(But yeah, i'm pretty sure it's Ryanair policy to say stupid crap to get free advertising).
For example, there are plenty of stories on TikTok of travellers being penalised for bags which fit into the Ryanair sizing tool, but which bulge ever so slightly out on the open side. There are businesses now which cater to Ryanair’s specific regulations in response.
As a result, when I flew with them recently, I was careful (almost to the point of paranoia!) to meet their specifications; and yet many passengers on the same flight were egregiously breaching the sizing rules, and not a single person was challenged.
Somehow I doubt the compliance rate is anywhere near 99.9% -- that's roughly 1 passenger breaking the rules every 5 flights? Would they really be investing so much (including having the CEO spend time on air to rant) in catching the delinquents if that's the scale of the problem?
As someone who mostly follows the rules, the thing that really bothers me about Ryanair and the like are, I'll get to the airport at least 2 hours early as I'm supposed to, and then there'll be a massive hour+ long check-in queue (which I have to wait in just to show my passport, even if I'm not checking bags, since online check in never seems to work when I need to enter passport info), and all the while they'll have staff shouting "Anyone going to <destination of flight that closes boarding in 20-30 minutes>?" and shepherding those passengers to the front of the queue. It irritates me to no end -- why the hell should I bother arriving early if I'm just going to be punished with a longer wait for it?
Every time I've been on a ryanair flight where they checked luggage sizes, it is always the case that 5-10 people have to pay. That is nowhere near one in a thousand passengers.
I’ve flown predominantly with Ryanair 4/5 times a year for over a decade and I have not once had to do this. Anecdotally I e always found their bag drop queues way quicker than other airlines too, even when it’s busy.
Either way, I stand by my main complaint about Ryanair letting late arrivers jump the queue even if I only have to "suffer" from it when I'm checking bags.
Only for it to be collected at the gate and put in the hold anyway, meaning we had to wait for it after all. At least they forgot to charge me for the inconvenience, which given the rest of my experience could almost have been considered a mistake from their side.
Then there was the return journey: the boarding pass couldn’t be printed until just a few hours before departure, by which time getting access to a printer was tricky. But, as with all things Ryanair, there was of course an option to pay and make the problem go away. Out of sheer stubbornness, I found a workaround. If I factor in the time spent, it probably cost me more—but by that point, I was so utterly fed up with their relentless upselling that I refused to give them another penny.
And finally, during a layover before the last leg of our journey, we ended up sat in a grounded aircraft in full sun for 2–3 hours, with small children onboard and barely any information before we could leave the plane. While we waited, another passenger collapsed from what I understood to be severe hypoglycaemia, at which point people started calling out for anything sugary.
As far as I remember (this was over a decade ago and I had three young kids with me a few rows back), the person was helped thanks to another passenger who recognised what was going on and acted quickly—not because of any intervention from the crew.
If you can avoid Ryanair, do. I’ve no issue with trading comfort for a lower fare—but Ryanair doesn’t feel like a cheaper flight because they’ve cut costs. It feels like they’ve gone out of their way to invent new ways to make life miserable, just so they can charge you for relief.
Having to gate-check can happen with more reputable carriers too, from American Airlines to British Airways. Even if every single bag individually fits, on a full flight, not every bag for everyone can fit at the same time. It happens more often with smaller (and older) planes, which have less cabin space per passenger.
But as I remember it, the misery was systematic—from the moment we started booking to the moment we left the final airport. At every step, Ryanair seemed to go out of their way to make things unpleasant—unless, of course, we paid an extra £15 here, £20 there, and so on—for each passenger, and for every inconvenience it seemed they’d quite clearly engineered.
Trust me, this man VERY much wants the business, he makes all profit from that, they also wont let you checking 3 hours before the flight for free. You need to go to a physical kiosk for them to print your ticket, for the lovely fee of 60EUR.
They upcharge everything and it's fine.
The people who have slightly bigger bags are not intentionally bringing those extra 500 grams of clothing and chancing their arm.
> "eliminate the scourge"
I like Oleary, but this is just lazy ragebaiting from him now.
I don't, I've worked for people like him and they make your life a misery.
I don't understand how you can say "not intentionally" when they absolutely are intentionally bringing their bag that is over the airline's policy with however much crap they can cram into it. It's not like they are "oops, I used the wrong bag". They are knowingly bringing the bag they have. Also, I know no one that brings a bag half packed. They are all stuffed to the gills. Especially when trying to cram all of the stuff they would normally bring into a smaller bag.
In a capitalist system, what anything "should" be is what brings most profits. Any alignment with other desirable outcomes is by sheer chance.
Hard to take issue with it when they're basically splitting the savings with the customer.
F that. If you're removing a belligerent passenger, part of the punishment should be that you have to pay to have your luggage returned to you when it arrives at the destination. Getting kicked off the plane should not me you get to delay everyone else even further by making them go find your luggage before the plane can depart. F that.
The solution is to set minimum baggage allowance regulations to prevent a race to the bottom.
Loading and unloading bags from the hold costs time and money. Transporting those bags from bag-drop to the plane means paying the airport for that privilege. Misplaced bags etc. adds a customer service overhead.
Ryanair deliberately don't use jet bridges so they can load/unload from both ends using built-in stairs
They use(d) a “smaller size than other European airlines and I’ve seen them check entire flights one by one during boarding and fine everyone over their stupid non standard size. Pretty much all the people with hard cases got nailed with fines
That combined with enthusiasm to check it and fine seemed pretty intentional to me
Ryanair already has a lot of dark patterns and excessive fees (e.g. assigning random seats to members of the same family, just to force them pay extra to seat next to each other)
Remember that the mass of something is the same if it is in the hold or in the cabin, and just because something is large doesn't mean it necessarily has a large mass.
Ryanair earns every time they identify an oversized bag at the boarding gate. They just share some of that money with their staff.
I recently saw a lady try to make this point to them, only for the staff to keep repeating “but it sticks out”. In the end, the lady had to take the belt off her jacket and wrap it around the bag just to make the point. What a waste of time.
People who defend this airline “because it’s cheap” are just degrading themselves quite frankly. It’s awful and we shouldn’t be accepting of it.