Ryanair sucks June 1, 2007
Posted by Jörg Michael in LifeAfter my wife and I had decided that we'd go to Dublin for ILUG2007, it was time to book our flights. We decided to try Ryanair. This was our very first flight on Ryanair. Turns out that was a pretty stupid mistake. I won't be surprised if experienced Ryanair customers tell me that "sure, that's how they operate" or "what did you expect?". Oh well ...
We decided to take the 10:15am (!!) flight out of (Frankfurt-)Hahn on Wednesday. Since I would be spending the next two days at the conference, we thought it would be nice to be in Dublin at 11:15am the day before the conference. That would have given me some time to explore the city before diving into ILUG. However, a couple of days before the flight, we were informed that the 10:15 flight was cancelled and we were now going to be on the 10:00pm flight. At least we did get to the hotel before midnight. So Ryanair managed to leave a lasting negative impression before we even got to the airport.
Next, Ryanair's really clever luggage policy. You get (actually, you pay for, separately) a 15 kg baggage allowance per person. So for two persons, that would seem to be 30kg. Bzzzt. Wrong. Not at Ryanair. Two persons flying together can not combine their 15kg allowance. So when you try to be nice and leave some room in the cargo hold and take only one suitcase that weighs 21kg, you get to pay 6 x 8€ for excess baggage.
Should I ever end up flying Ryanair again, which doesn't seem all that likely right now, we will have a separate suitcase for each person. Should any of those suitcases happen to end up under 15kg, I'll be sure to add some bricks to make sure they all hit 15kg.