Ryanair is one opinionated company

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1826-ryanair-is-one-opinionated-company

by mattjaynes • 17 years ago

8 24 17 years ago

jwilliams• 17 years ago

Ryanair say these things for the publicity. Quite often you'll see a Ryanair story about charging for toilets, or obese passengers... Keeps them on the front page.

catzaa2• 17 years ago

> Ryanair story about charging for , or obese passengers...

I see no problem with it. It is torture to sit on a flight next to an extremely obese person. They take up more plane space so they should pay more. They also turn a 13 hour flight into 13 hour torture for those on the left, right and in front of them.

The same goes for hand luggage. You get stupid ass people that will remove your laptop (only luggage) from a safe place and put it so that it can fall down to make place for their 3 pieces of luggage.

pmjordan• 17 years ago

Unfortunately they got shot down on grounds of discrimination for that suggestion. It's one of their crazy schemes I would have actually supported. Airlines have always annoyed me with the fact that you have to pay crazy money if your luggage is 1kg overweight but the guy next to you weighs 80kg more than you and pays the same.

Ryanair annoy me in other ways though, such as the mad dash for the seats, and their habit of introducing hidden fees late in the booking process. (they happen to be the only airline to service the journey to my girlfriend's parents with direct flights, so we use them a few times a year)

Odd: from the article:

“Will we give you a refund on a nonrefundable ticket because your granny died unexpectedly?” he asked. “No! Go away. We’re not interested in your sob stories! What part of ‘no refund’ do you not understand?”

whereas Ryanair do actually fully refund tickets if an immediate relative dies.

dazzawazza• 17 years ago

Yeah and disabled people and ill people. The take up precious time and space!

Is it not a slippery slope where people who are not standardised are charged more? Maybe non standard people should sit at the back of the plane so no one has to see them?

I thought we'd progressed beyond this but it seems we are still a greedy, self centred species at heart willing to condemn a fellow member for a few pathetic dollars and a few minutes of our lives.

axod3• 17 years ago

As well as weighing your luggage at the check in desk, they should weigh you. And if you're too fat, tell you to go away and diet, or pay an excess.

andyjenn• 17 years ago

..exactly, like the time they claimed it was faster and cheaper travelling from London to Brussels and were in breach of advertising standards. I think they were on CNN, BBC, Ch4 etc.. every hour to get their point across. Damn fine advertising strategy.

viraptor4• 17 years ago

Why is this hacker news? Anyways, it's annoying when they're reiterating the same line all the time...

"Ryanair promises four things: low fares, a good on-time record, few cancellations and few lost bags."

Fares aren't low. Easyjet beats them most of the time. Their prices are low only on the front page. It's only 30£ both ways... just add 50£ airport fees (I wonder why other airlines charge only <10£ for the same airport) each way, 20£ if you want to add even 1 piece of luggage, 10£ if you don't opt-out of fast boarding and we're going to ask you to select your nationality many times (only slightly indicating that by doing that you agree to buy insurance). Oh, and 10-15£ fee for handling any credit card at the end. And other things...

So you end up paying ~200£ for a flight that's advertised as 30£. They also wanted to be excluded some time ago from services that listed their real prices.

Oh and on-time flights... that's easy - just say that a 3h flight will take 3.5h - this way they're always 'on time' and passengers can wait some time at the airport (I'm used to arriving 30 min. early on my usual flight)

andyking• 17 years ago

I don't fly, but friends who've used Ryanair have tales of people going down the aeroplane aisle with catalogues, scratch cards, lottery tickets and all sorts of other junk for sale right through the flight. I've even heard an apocryphal story of someone being woken up so they couldn't sleep through the salespeople!

viraptor4• 17 years ago

Yes, that happens on every flight. Catalogue after ~1h in the air, and lottery ~1h before landing. The prices are usually lower than on the airport, but higher than in shops.

marcusbooster• 17 years ago

I read an article that discussed the CEO's vision of having completely free flights... by turning the plane into a flying casino.

barrkel• 17 years ago

I've flown on both Easyjet and Ryanair many times - I'm Irish living in UK and no other low-cost airline will compete with Ryanair on its home turf - and I cannot agree with you. Easyjet are usually 10-50% more expensive, but I normally pay the extra for the reduced stress level, fewer ads and higher convenience of destination airport.

viraptor4• 17 years ago

Maybe it depends on a route... I'm flying Bristol -- DE and Bristol -- PL. The only reason I'm using ryanair instead of easyjet is that they fly to my exact destination - with easyjet, I'd have to be the next 3-4h in travel (so together with the flight I'm losing a whole day). I'm prepared pay additional ~70£ to avoid that.

cool-RR• 17 years ago

"Fares aren't low."

I paid 16 Euro for a Ryanair flight from Belgium to the UK, I'd say that's pretty low.

viraptor4• 17 years ago

There are one-off promotions of course. And you can get them in any airline. Sure it can happen. But it's not the norm.

If you look at current "offers" you get a 12£ Bratislava flight (chosen at random - really)... if you click "continue" enough times, it's actually: Adult @ 12.99 GBP, Taxes/Fees details 28.27 GBP, Coming Back (Web Fare) 1 Adult @ 12.00 GBP, 1 x (Web Check in) 5.00 GBP

Total Cost of Flight 58.26 GBP

Yay - that's really almost 12£ ;) And you have to pay for the payment too, so it's ~68.26£

Huppie• 17 years ago

This article is all about a company (does't matter much that this is RyanAir) that chooses to identify itself by four promises, and they keep them. They deliberately choose not to value things that other companies will value (customer support) in order to attract customers.... and guess what? It works.

Startups should think about their core values and choose a set that they think will work the best.

Hey.... wasn't Hacker News that website with news-links of interest to hackers and startups?

edw519• 17 years ago

(Southwest manages to take a similar approach without coming off as hostile to customers).

[Disclaimer: Raving Southwest fan.]

AFAIC, Southwest is better than almost every other airline in almost every other category. Why? Because they have built a business the way I would want to build one, with one thing in mind: the customer.

Almost everything they do is what the customer wants because someone bothered to ask. Whenever I fly another airline, the differences are noticeable and I ask, "Don't these people get it?"

Ryanair sounds like they're doing the same thing in a mechanical way. Once they engage their customers as Southwest has, they'll have raving fans too.

Ryanair is one opinionated company

Related Stories