marksabout

No Ryanair journey is complete without a good rant; even the best prepared among us will encounter problems. I did my best to avoid frustration, waking with one hour’s grace so that I would arrive at the airport early and if  confronted with the inevitable mind-numbing problem I could solve it without resorting to paying a ‘supplement;’ I measured and weighed my bag at home, all good. Arrived early, queued, and waited in the check-in line… An odd requirement, as Ryanair requires you to check in online or will charge you 40€ for a boarding pass. I get to the front of the queue and find that as a non-EU citizen (still), I have to have my passport verified at another counter. Apparently the staff at Ryanair are so mechanically trained that it is necessary for a specialist to match the name on the passport with the name on the boarding pass. Oh! and they also have to compare the photo with the passenger. Some genius has determined that this tricky L-shaped transaction is more efficient at another queue. In Barcelona that is,  in Oporto, the check-in folk are multitalented, so I discovered after wandering about looking for the special passport check desk on the return flight.

While half the team at Ryanair (Barcelona) are incompetent of performing passport checks, they are well equipped to measure oversized bags, promoting discontent and preholiday stress by standing over nervous passengers as they try to squeeze their bag in the rigid 55x40x20cm measuring device. Of course, there needs to be a limit to the size of cabin baggage when nobody opts to take the 40€ option of stowing their luggage in the fuselage…

The bit that stung me though, was unavoidable. I don’t understand how an online business can get away with charging a fee for processing a credit card transaction. Ryanair charge per sector, not per transaction, so you get whacked with the credit card processing fee twice on a return Journey. I dunno, it seems fraudulent to me when some companies charge a 1% transaction fee for online purchases and Ryanair charged me almost 15% of the transaction, but doesn’t really quote this in the cost of the flight.

When you finally board, there’s the additional commerce. Everyone does it, I guess, but Ryanair has their cabin crew selling something different every 15 minutes, including (!!!) “smokeless cigarettes that you can use anywhere on the plane!” The overhead lockers are also covered in advertising, though all the ads were the same, so they kind of blended in, and I can’t remember what was being advertised.

Ryanair self-styles as the “world’s favourite airline,” patting themselves on the back for arriving on time as if this isn’t an expectation and, in their onflight magazine they publish stats about how good they are. Interestingly, they include a lost baggage per passenger statistic, comparing themselves to airlines that include free checked baggage… More interesting would be a lost baggage per bag stat. Anyway.

I arrived in Oporto safe and on time, “snaps” to Ryanair, on the return trip we arrived late, but Ryanair still played its celebratory on-time arrival jingle?

To be honest it wasn’t that bad, and it’s particularly good if you like being patronised. And you can’t reserve seats, but nobody clambers towards the exit row so I had plenty of space despite being one of the last to board.