Ryanair - RYR > Reviews > RYAINAIR REVIEW NO. 142

Author's product rating:   

Food Quality	Very poor
Customer Service	Friendly and attentive
Punctuality	Always on time
Space	Comfortable
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	cheap, cheap, cheap .  .  .  .  can get you to places weird and wonderfull at a fraction of a normal price
Disadvantages:	airports choice (especially for big cities); in - flight food and drink; not very helpful when things go wrong (or so it is said)

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I have been considering NOT writing another Ryanair review as there seems to be great many on the site already (over 140). However, majority of them are quite old and the last one is from December last year so I decided to describe the Ryanair experience without putting too much of the general factual information into the op.

However, to keep the obsession with completeness satisfied, here is some basics, feel free to skip if you know everything or even most about Ryanair.

*** General***

www.ryanair.com is THE cheap flights airline, no doubts about it. Nobody else allows you to travel paying virtually nothing but taxes (flight price 99 pence for one leg of the journey). Of course you have to be lucky, very flexible and book well in advance to take advantage of those fares.

They cover almost all of the Western Europe, from Scandinavia to Italy and from Portugal to Germany and of course Ireland as well as providing domestic flights within UK. However, they don't fly to Eastern Europe nor to Greece. So far, anyway, as new connections are being opened all the time. They operate from several hubs, the main being of course Stanstead for the continental Europe and Dublin for the British Isles, but there are also numerous connections from Rome, Girona and Brussles.

Ryanair uses out-of-the way, smaller airports but I DO feel that the terribly negative opinion on that score is slightly unfair. It is true that as far as big, big cities with multiple airports go Ryanair uses facilities which are often miles away and sometimes even in another country (as in Malmo for Copenhagen). However, for many smaller locations they simply use the local airport and actually being able to fly to those places without using a complicated and expensive international-domestic relay schedule might be seen as a plus as well as minus. I flew with Ryanair twice, one to Treviso (for Venice) and once to Brindisi (for Puglia in general) and in both cases the airports were small, old and poky, but the public transport services to local towns/tourist centres were reasonably efficient (meaning they existed) and it took less time and hassle to get from Treviso to Venice or from Brindisi to Lecce than the normal journey from Heathrow to let's say North or East London takes if you use the tube. Turnover of passengers and wait-times for luggage etc. seem to be faster at these small airports as well.

The major problem I have with Ryanair, airport wise is really only one and is called STANSTEAD. It is not a terrible airport, although it certainly lost its pre-cheap-flights serenity; but it is just such a pain to get to. It was a pain while living in London (no car) and it is a pain while living in Dover (car); this time due to extortionate parking charges. Getting to and/or parking the car at Stanstead often threatens to be the most expensive part of the journey. See in the 'experience' section for our solution.

The booking is done on line and the on-line experience is quite pleasant, the site is easy to use and intuitive and, although still does not allow you to ask for 'all flights below five quid in the next 30 days please' it allows easy change of the day of flight as you search for your cheap option.

Each leg is booked separately and if you use several 'leaps' in your onward journey, you have to book each of those separately as well, as Ryanair provide point-to-point service.

The booking process consists then of choosing your departure and destination points, choosing dates with the option of scrolling forwards and backwards in search of the cheapest option and then paying for the tickets.

Your are issued with the reservation number, which is also e-mailed to you together with conditions of carriage. Holding on to that is crucial as they might charge you extra for retrieving it if you don't have it.

Ryanair offers a lot of travel-related extras on its site and on the planes, from telecomm cards to hotel and hostel reservations to airport parking to deal on car hire with Hertz to travel insurance. As we have not used any of these services I cannot comment on them. They seem OK but not terribly competitive or attractive. The more general information on their destinations is interesting but generally seems very rosy.

Surprisingly, they allow for re-booking (a big advantage over your standard super-apex economy fare) regarding both dates and persons travelling. There is additional cost of 25 GBP per re-booking plus of course the cost of the difference between your original fare and what is the cheapest now; but it still might come cheaper than starting from scratch, depending on your original costs.

The luggage allowance is small (15 kg) and a couple travelling with a lot of gear (e.g. camping) might find it too little. We had three full-priced tickets (anybody over 2 years old travels as adult) and all the stuff we had was still well within 45 kg allowed.

There is no free food or drinks on board and there is no luggage transfers between legs of journey so you need to lug it alone so to speak.

***Our experience 2004***

We flew to Brindisi from Stanstead, on what was a new route and we paid a total of 92 pounds for three return tickets, of which the actual Ryanair fee was 24 pounds, the rest being taxes. Well, this really in my opinion says it all...

---Parking---

Parking for two weeks would normally cost a tad above 100 GBP in Stanstead's Pink Elephant long-stay car park. It is possible to find an airport hotel that would provide you with a double or even a family room PLUS 15 nights free parking for about 100-110 GBP and in the light of that spending this kind of money just for parking seems positively insane, especially as the cheapest Ryanair flights either leave or depart at very early or pretty late hours.

The solution we found was to use one of B&B's abounding in the villages round Stanstead and use it just for parking without taking a room. This cut our parking costs to 50 pounds and included a lift to and from airport as well as a free little tow when the car (a clapped-out diesel) did not want to start on our return.

I suspect it is probably possible to do it cheaper than that as it was virtualy the first place outside Stanstead Airport that offered such a service.

--- check in, flights and the like ---

Only two check-in desks were used but there seemed to be no delays or jams on the way and the whole process did not exceed 15 minutes including taking all our stuff to outsized luggage window. The staff at the checkout were perfectly polite and quite efficient without being particularly friendly and this did me just fine.

The plane was a perfectly reasonable Boeing 737, a definite first-glance improvement on the post-Lufthansa one which still had German messages inside that we flew in 2000. The leg room was as it always is in economy - small but adequate for a three hour flight even for a tall and fat person that I am - not any tighter than in BA or LOT or SAS planes I flew for much more money.

The plane was virtually packed, mostly with Italians; people with small children and wheel-chairs had priority boarding so we were assured of sitting together, but a couple with an older child which was finding it difficult finding seats together was somehow accommodated.

The 3 members of cabin staff were courteous, busy and efficient. We had no problems so I had no chance of testing them but any normal request was met with prompt and friendly attention.

The flight left on time, landed on time and was totally uneventful.

We were briskly unloaded and passed through the immigration and luggage retrieval in Brindisi.

The return journey was roughly the same although twice a glitch happened. One of them will be known to those of you who read my Tiziano Hotel op, namely I brought our party to the airport a day early in the convinced belief that Tuesday was 23rd of June. While it was in fact 22nd. We DID try to contact Ryanair regarding possible rebooking of the flight, but the phone number we were given at the AiItalia ticket desk did not work in any of the configurations we tried. The lady at the ticket desk was distinctly unhelpful - I do not consider her to be Ryanair staff though. In fact, I had a distinctive feeling that Ryanair was not liked by the Brindisi airport staff at all. After arriving for our return flight next day and just before boarding we were called to the front of the throng waiting to board because a switched-on torch was discovered shining through the (red) fabric of the rucksack and apparently being a possible hazard. It was at the bottom of the rucksack, of course. DH managed to deal with the issue of extracting the offending item with help from some member of the ground staff fairly efficiently. The crew seemed to regard our case as source of some diversion rather than a real pain and the incident was certainly reassuring as far as security goes.

Eventually we found ourselves three seats and settled for the flight back. This way round the painful inadequacy and exorbitant pricing of the Ryanair in-flight menu was really, really clear. What is on offer is listed on a little menu card stuck to the ceiling above your head, near the light-bell-ventilation control panel and it consists of sandwiches - these; however, had run out by the time the trolley got to us and we were about half-way; Pringles, muffins, soft drinks, some booze and tea and coffee. Hot drinks cost the most, but luckily they at least disposed of the revolting teabag with integrated whitener that was served to me as tea on the 2000 flight. This time it was a normal black tea. Muffin advertised as large was in fact tiny as far as muffins go. And Pringles were, well, Pringles. The best value was probably provided by mineral water at 2 euro per half a litre bottle. The conclusion is thus - bring your own food and drinks, because regardless of high prices the food is often simply not there!

***Summary***

Ryanair provides incredibly cheap air travel in Western Europe. By incredibly cheap I mean less for getting to Italy than for a return ticket from London to Manchester. The cost of the journey is of course bumped up by (a) getting to the airport and/or parking - it is worth looking for options different than Pink Elephant (b) hotel costs or everything you spend in the airport if you have a long wait because of ungodly hours they fly at - but that CAN be avoided with some discipline (c) costs of food and drink bought on board - that can be avoided too if you prepare sandwiches/take water from your tap or supermarket etc. (d) any extra luggage costs you might incur if carrying too much stuff - very easy for single travellers.

I would definitely recommend it for exploration, independent holidays, 'where should we fly next month' type of trips, especially to smaller locations not easily reachable by direct flight from the UK. I would also recommend getting decent insurance to cover against Ryan air’s unwillingness to help their passengers if something goes wrong (e.g. flight gets cancelled and the next one is in two days). I would not recommend using Ryanair if the costs of the flights start to approach normal carriers. In other words, if you pay 30 or even 50 pounds return, all of the above is perfectly fine. Some people must however, pay much more and they would have been obviously better off with a 'proper' carrier'.

Would I use them again. Definitely. Should you? Decide based on the above description, as it is not for everybody.

P.S. Not a backpacker in sight! Weird, considering that Brindisi where a lot of ferries for Greece leave from. In fact. short of taking the coach this connection + being a ferry deck passenger might be one of the cheapest ways of getting to Greece from the UK. Can I see another trip on the horizon???

Thanks for reading.