If like us, you have the feeling that flying with Ryanair is no longer the bargain it used to be, you could be right.
The Sydney Morning Herald has just published a report showing Ryanair’s charges have increased by 700% since 2006.
You can avoid part of the increases by using a prepaid MasterCard (NB: prepaid Visa cards are not OK for this purpose) to pay for the bookings.
You save 5 Euro per person on each flight (ie. 10 Euro if you book a return ticket). Since we plan to be flying to Valencia quite often this year, I have just ordered a prepaid MasterCard from the Commerzbank. (You can also get them from many Sparkassen (Building Societies) in Germany). The cards cost the usual 30 Euro per year issue-fee from the bank, so it only pays to apply for one if you plan to travel by Ryanair several times in a year.
Not only have their flight rates increased by 700%, but the way they have push sales has increased accordingly.
On our most recent flight to Trapani/Sicily, I was really surprised to hear their constant sales pitch. Even the pilot had to make a couple of offers.
I had not used Ryanair since 2002, (when they started becoming popular) and therefore was not accustomed to their new way of trying to get more revenues on board.
In regards to safety, I feel OK flying with Ryanair.
>> In regards to safety, I feel OK flying with Ryanair.
Me too. I read some years ago that Lufthansa has the contract to maintain the planes (I don’t know if that is still true), and the fleet has a low average age.
They are also punctual, and once when we couldn’t land in Santander, they diverted the flight to Bilbao and organised buses free of charge to take us back to Santander, which we hadn’t expected.
So I can’t and don’t complain about the service or the quality.
But I do get quite annoyed at all the extra charges, and I don’t think they are half as cheap as they used to be back in 2002 (which is also about the time we started flying with them). Nowadays it is sometimes nearly as cheap, and more convenient, to fly with Lufthansa between Frankfurt and London, and that certainly wasn’t the case in 2002!