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Comment by chris_va | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what happens when someone does not own a smartphone (or the battery is dead)? They just can't fly?

And, if their server flaky, does that mean all boarding will stop? If the agents can check people in manually, it seems like the small fraction of people using a paper boarding pass can't be adding much extra cost. If they are saving cost by removing that flow, presumably they are giving up redundancy. Given the quality of airline software, I predict they will see a mass outage within a year.

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The whole business model of discount airlines is to cater to the fat part of the bell curve and not the long tails. If you require special accommodation at any point in the process don't fly via a super budget value airline. Even if they do support your use case, they're not in the business of making it easy and they'll hit you with a "fuck you" fee to make it worth their while.

> If you require special accommodation at any point in the process don't fly via a super budget value airline

That sounds pretty illegal if they aren't making accommodations for disabilities.

Discount airlines charge you if you so much as talk to a gate agent. I think their lawyers have found ironclad routings around something like that.

They'll make accommodations, but those will be very budget accommodations and not comfy, just like everything else about them.

Hence why you're better off going with something else. In fact, you're almost always better off going with something else. I'm not a giant, but at 6'4" (1.93 meters) I've found that I absolutely detest most shared transit. Either my legs are too long or shoulders too broad, and even non-budget airlines can be unpleasant to fly in.

The one advantage Ryanair has over non-budget airlines is that none of their seats recline.

It’s true, in my experience at 6’7” it is much nicer to fly private. Shared transport offers a much inferior experience except on long haul flights where you have actual first class, but even then you need to be careful while booking to not accidentally end up on some silly plane.

Yeah, disability accommodation laws are pretty weak, even in the countries with the strongest protections. "reasonable" accommodations often equate to situations that still don't actually provide practical accommodations for people.

I'm not sure I understand. It sounds like you're saying you don't like the leg room being so cramped that beyond a certain height you're physically required to angle your knees into a neighboring seat's space. That's surely part of the charm though?

It's bad enough when I have to fight for elbow room with the people next to me. It's a whole 'nother experience to fight for the elbow room of the people in front of me to have a place to put my knees.

I had the misfortune of acquiring a temporary disability while I was overseas and it kind of opened my eyes to how shitty the west treats the disabled. While I was in eastern airports the staff were tripping over themselves to accommodate me. I was assigned at least one person whose entire job was to stay with me and take me where I needed to go. They handled my bags, security, even got me food and drinks when I got hungry. It was beyond respectful. But as soon as I got to the western leg of the journey home I became a burden. I basically just got a wheelchair and my partner had to push me around while juggling our luggage.

It's crazy to see real life proof that it doesn't have to be this way.

Every American I know who has spent time overseas comes back with at least one thing where they can't believe how massively we've screwed it up while also somehow ignoring that it's been being handled far more sensibly by others.

The right wing rise world wide will gut disability accommodations.

Not having a smart phone is not a disability

I once flew from London on Ryanair when the airport's passenger Wi-Fi was completely down, and 4G was completely overloaded as a result as well.

Things were indeed pretty chaotic. I can't remember if they did print paper boarding passes in the end.

> it seems like the small fraction of people using a paper boarding pass can't be adding much extra cost

You're looking at this from the wrong angle: This is Ryanair. Actual cost does not matter, only the opportunity to extract more revenue. Presumably app users are that much more valuable to Ryanair (as they can be upsold various things there, and potentially because it also acts as a filter for a generally less profitable customer segment).

The upsell opportunity isn't worth anywhere near $50 though. I suspect it acts as a price discrimination filter. You make people jump through hoops (ie. installing an app) to save some money, with the expectation that people who are willing to jump through hoops are more price sensitive, and would also be willing to switch to another airline.

They already charge that and more if you have to check-in at the airport for any reason. And you cannot check-in online without making an account with them. Ryanair is grift squared.

That said I never had problems boarding with a PDF displayed on the phone screen. Unfortunate that they're going away.

It's also a marketing channel for future flights. The app almost certainly asks for notification permissions, and most people will say yes -- they're useful for knowing if your flight is delayed or there's a gate change.

Now they have a channel where they can let you know about deals, etc. I'm sure they've modeled exactly how much this is worth, and I'd be willing to bet it's a lot.

Re notifications: I have seen important apps not working unless you allow notifications.

This might be the case here as well.

You wanna fly? Allow notifications!

Isn't that against App Store guidelines? (Not that Apple could afford to kick out Ryanair, but I think they have other options, such as blocking updates until it's been remedied etc.)

Stupid question here, because I haven't flown with Ryanair in like almost 10 years, but I've recently flown with WizzAir and after checking-in online (the night before) it generated a .pdf boarding pass which I saved on my phone. I was then able to get onto the plane by presenting the QR code from said .pdf, i.e. while I was at the gate, no need for internet access. Does Ryanair do things differently?

These byzantine arguments and justifications and profit motivation and incentive tea readings are so ridiculous at a certain point, I'm surprised so many people wont even consider socializing airlines.

What a cold comfort to a grandma struggling to use an upsell-focused dark patterns app when the wifi is poor at some airport to get home to see her grandkids stuck at some airport to say, "Well, this maximized shareholder revenue."

I feel like I'm in the last stages of 'anything goes' capitalism. The ridiculousness here has hit such levels, especially in the USA, that there must be pushback sooner than later. I dunno how the Irish feel about this considering this is their airline (HQ at least), or their experiences, but on this side of the pond, this has all has reached new levels of absurdity that would make even Kafka blush.

I just randomly checked Dublin to Rome route, for early December. The first 3 cheapest options are Ryanair, the 4th option (Air Lingus) is almost triple the price of the cheapest one, $262 vs $90

That’s your answer. People vote with their wallet.

Contrary to what many replies are telling you, the link clearly states that if you don't own a smartphone, you can check in online and then obtain a boarding pass for free at the airport.

(Not sure how easy that will be or if they actually verify that you don't own a smartphone, etc.)

I’m sorry, I am not seeing that at all at the link. I am surely missing something, but can you cut/paste what you are seeing on this point?

The linked article doesn't have that info. But it is in their FAQ

https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/lp/explore/digital-boarding-pa...

> as long as they have already checked-in online before arriving at the airport, they will receive a free of charge boarding pass at the airport.

Technically, the vast majority of users don't own their device. They are leasing it through their carrier. Then because it is HN, once the device is paid off, the user still doesn't own it as they cannot use it as they see fit and still must use it as the manufacturer sees fit. So this "own" word is potential for interpretation

>Contrary to what many replies are telling you, the link clearly states that if you don't own a smartphone, you can check in online and then obtain a boarding pass for free at the airport.

The press release says absolutely nothing of the sort.

Frontier already expects digital boarding passes. I do not own a phone, so they charged me a $25 fee to print one at customer service. Except they also do not accept cash, so I had to go buy a gift card with cash from a vending machine for another $5 fee.

For $30 I could buy an entire discount printer and print one myself.

Thank you for FAXing this comment in :)

Or just using a laptop or a desktop pc…

You can print Frontier boarding passes. They just make the link very hard to find.

Keep in mind that Ryanair already charges €50 to print you a replacement boarding pass at the counter if you can't make the app work...

but you can print for free before heading to the airport

Not now.

If you own a printer.

I've once been in that situation with Ryanair: I booked through some reseller, not knowing that they'd make all bookings using some omnibus Ryanair account they would not share the password for (so mobile app use was out), and only emailed me the boarding pass PDF. But I didn't have a printer...

The airport business center did have one, with a moderate 50 cent per page fee – except if that page contains a boarding pass, in which case it was 8 Euro.

Interesting price discrimination here.

I would've photoshopped the barcode onto a Covid certificate and then ask to print it...

Isn't barcode on the PDF good enough anyway, to be scanned by a machine (either biological or electronic)? Obviously it's Scamair, so they could've imposed dumb rules like "we need the physical paper"

Yup, that's it. They explicitly weren't allowing scanning off of a screen, as far as I remember. (The code on the screen might be fraudulent, after all – can't do that on paper!)

> passengers will no longer be able to download and print a physical paper boarding pass

10 years ago I had to pay ryanair that amount for I didn't print the boarding pass. How the times have changed.

> Out of curiosity, what happens when someone does not own a smartphone (or the battery is dead)?

Or you drop your phone. Or it gets stolen. Or for whatever reason the software fails. Electronic devices are so flimsy, even if you want to use an app it's worth having paper as a backup option. It's the same reason why I always carry cash and a card on me (and I pay in cash as much as possible anyway).

My wife used to laugh at me that I almost always print out a boarding pass. Until the day her phone died at the gate.

Not to mention that the hard copy always scans flawlessly at the gate. Phone scans, not so much.

Not only does the phone scan not work well, but people often aren't prepared and so the boarding line stalls while people unlock their phone and retrieve the e-ticket.

> Not to mention that the hard copy always scans flawlessly at the gate. Phone scans, not so much.

Not true. Recently I printed a hardcopy of my boarding pass at the airline's kiosk, then found it wouldn't scan at security. Luckily I was able to pull up the barcode on my phone.

Ouch. Perhaps it's a dice roll either way. I guess I just assumed everyone else also had issues with phone tickets, and not with paper. You and your sibling comment have opposite experiences however, so it seems I must retract my statement.

That's the point...always have a backup. You never know which failure mode is gonna find you.

Phone scan works fine. People not knowing how to travel/board a plane is a different issue.

One thing their phone app does is crank the brightness to maximum when you view the boarding pass.

> If you have already checked-in online and your smartphone or tablet dies, you will receive a free of charge boarding pass at the airport.

> If passengers don’t have a smartphone or tablet, as long as they have already checked-in online before arriving at the airport, they will receive a free of charge boarding pass at the airport.

https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/lp/explore/digital-boarding-pa...

This is simply the mindset of discount airlines. If your battery is dead when you arrive at check-in that's too bad for you. It's in the terms and conditions.

If the server is flaky then boarding will be delayed for everyone and it'll be a whole crapshow but if their overall cost is lower than it would have been with printed boarding passes, fine.

Usually they'll happily help you out with a "late boarding pass printing fee" on the order of a hundred €/$, though.

If this really is a total refusal to do even that, I'd be slightly surprised, but I'm sure their business developers have done the analysis and it makes some sense to them.

I’m surprised they can get away with it in the EU. T&C or not, you paid for a fare and they know you did

It is said on their website that if you lose your phone or it dies, you can get a free boarding pass at the airport.

Source: https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/lp/explore/digital-boarding-pa...

You would also be surprised at how 'tech savvy' non-tech people are in the UK. It is quite common for non-tech people to screenshot train ticket QR codes just in case they have no signal at the station yet none of the common train booking apps suggest this.

Rest assured, Ryanair knows their passengers very well. They know that every single one of their passengers knows how to babysit a smartphone so the battery doesn't die on their flight. Let's be honest, sudden unexpected incontinence is more likely than a Ryanair passenger fluffing up their pocket device for doom-scrolling.

For more fun, Frontier's app doesn't even run on my phone. Step 1 to fly with them is to go buy a phone from the last 2-3 years (can probably get away with something a little older if iOS).

Passport/EU-ID to check you already have a ticket should be the standard. Everyone saves time and money this way BUT now they can earn more money at the gate.

In Norway on Norwegian carriers all you need for internal travel is the credit card you booked the ticket with.

No ID? So anyone with the card can use the ticket?

That's normal in the Schengen area, you only need ID if you're checking a bag. (Or if there's a spot check by police, but they won't care if your boarding pass matches your ID, just that your ID is valid.)

If they're for sale online, anyone with the card can buy another ticket.

Most of the answers are here:

https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/lp/explore/digital-boarding-pa...

Re: the "their server is flaky" (I believe you mean at the gate) case, I think any airline might be then struggling with boarding passengers, whether they have paper boarding cards or not.

For what it is worth, at least on iPhone you can still use the bus/train pass feature in Wallet even when the battery is dead.

But it has always been the Ryanair brand to ask the consumer "how much bullshit are you willing to put up with to save a buck?"

> For what it is worth, at least on iPhone you can still use the bus/train pass feature in Wallet even when the battery is dead.

Doesn't seem like it'll help in this case, seems Ryanair is forcing the usage to be via their app instead of anything else.

It depends on the details. Last time I flew I used the airline's app to get the ticket which were then immediately loaded into wallet and read via NFC at the gate.

But this is Ryanair so it's probably going to do some stupid QR thing that will be super touchy and be a struggle to work on at least half of the devices. Bonus points if the app refuses to start if it can't make a live internet connection back to some cursed cloud service so the people waiting in line who accidentally let their phone go to sleep find they can't get it to show the ticket in the dead zone at the gate.

For what it's worth, I flew multiple times using the boarding pass from their app without any problem.

You need the app to download the pass (AFAIK) but it goes into your Google/Apple wallet after that. I have the app disabled (so it can't run in the background, as much as possible), and I only use it to get the pass.

I wish they'd just let me download a pkpass file, but what can you do.

>For what it is worth, at least on iPhone you can still use the bus/train pass feature in Wallet even when the battery is dead.

AFAIK that only works for NFC passes? For passes that are just qr/bar codes I can't imagine how that'd work if the battery is actually dead. The "use bus passes when battery is dead" feature only works because there's dedicated low power circuitry to power the NFC hardware, which obviously doesn't exist for the display.

You pay 50 €.

No problem. Normally they can print a ticket for you. 50 bucks...

We talk about ryanair, the scummiest of the bottom scum of airlines, they wanted to charge everybody 2 euros to use toilet (or did it pass? I can't imagine in EU, I would piss on their cabinets since I don't carry coins around).

I always print boarding passes, traveled enough to see tons of people struggling with their phones, with their pdf viewers or airline apps, to block everybody else to know what good manners and empathy to others (or simply less stressful travel) are. I wish I could save that atto fraction of a planet by not printing but it can't be like that with current ways of things.

Luckily ryanair is mostly absent from our airport (Geneva), its Easyjet all the way, way more than even Swiss airlines which chickened out on numerous levels on every swiss airport apart from Zurich. They are low cost with their share of issues but man, compared to ryanair they are absolute top versus rotten vomit, to keep things polite but precise.

> Out of curiosity, what happens when someone does not own a smartphone (or the battery is dead)? They just can't fly?

Yup, based on this announcement, and previous policy calls they've made, that person won't be able to fly. End of. They lose their seat, kthxbye!

Ryanair has made its way in the budget market (arguably inventing the budget market to some extent), by employing money-making practices of dubious need from charging people to use toilets on-board, to flying with so little fuel that they regularly call fuel emergencies on approach.

Their bet - that the market seems to support - is that people will put up with almost anything if it means a cheaper ticket.

They're even expecting to get clearance from authorities to get rid of proper seating and move to "standing seats" so they can get more people onboard, their theory being you'll stand for 3 hours on a plane if it means your ticket is x% cheaper.

I refuse to fly with them on principle - they're a terrible airline owned by a terrible person, run in a terrible way. It's only a matter of time before people realise just how dangerous they are as an operation. I hope it's just a data security issue they run into and people run away from the app scared, and not the increasingly inevitable hull loss that many have been predicting for years.

This is just another reason not to fly with them, for me.

>to flying with so little fuel that they regularly call fuel emergencies on approach.

If you're talking about the recent incident, I thought that was because they tried landing several times at different airports? Is there any evidence that they routinely fly with less fuel buffer than other airlines?

a lot of hearsay saying they pack less fuel than other airlines (but not below minimum required limit) in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539943

> (but not below minimum required limit)

I hate just about everything I know about Ryanair but if they're not below required limits, then I'd say they're not the problem and the point is moot.

but no one said they did illegal stuff;) just purposefully unsafer stuff than other airlines

strawman

Sure, I first heard about this years ago when Channel 4 (a UK broadcaster) ran a program about pilots stating they were concerned about the policy. There had been outrage within the aviation industry after three fuel emergencies in one day at one airport. [0] Ryanair sued [1], and lost: Channel 4 had engaged in fair journalism, it turns out.

Seems they're still at it, hence the recent incident.

[0] https://www.eurocockpit.eu/news/fuelling-debate-safety-vs-pr... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23686678

All three flights were diverted due to weather, and none of them fell below the legally required amount of fuel. One has to wonder if it’s really reasonable to criticize them in this instance if a single weather event affected them all.

> charging people to use toilets on-board

AFAIK this has never happened.

This is a PR stunt that is regularly used (like the idea of standing-room-only tickets) to generate a new round of press for the company and highlight how cost-efficient and ruthless they are, which aligns with their branding and keeps the story alive.

I understand the sentiment but as sibling comment points out, you're very light in the way of stating facts to back up these claims.

There's an interview with the CEO where he explains (claims) the idea of that policy is to reduce demand so they can leave out a couple of toilets and put in / sell more seats -- it's not about the charge for the toilet per se.

> There's an interview with the CEO

May I point out that your counter-argument to "this is a PR stunt" is "no no, the CEO himself floated this idea publicly and got interviewed in the press to talk about it".

I mean it isn’t surprising people put up such abuse when I find that usually these discount airlines are half the ticket price of a major carrier for the same sort of flight. I’ve gotten remarkably good at efficiently packing my allotted small personal item bag.

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