A recent trip to Salzburg has further entrenched my opinion that Ryanair employ some very dodgy practices in order to extract money from their captive customers.
There are numerous examples on the ground, be it the ticket touts selling last minute queue-jumping passes at the departure gates or the barrage of tannoy announcements once you are on oard one of their planes, flogging everything from lottery tickets to train tickets. Yes, that pisses me off but I can live with it.
What I found really galling though, was when I was checking with my family for the return flight and the woman at the check in desk informed that we only had allowance for one piece of luggage between me and my wife. This was despite having the correct allowance on the outbound flight from Stanstead.
Sure enough, she showed me the printout and it did show that I had failed to pay for a baggage allowance for both me and my wife when I had booked the flight online. I then cast my mind back to the experience I had when trying to book the flight on the Ryanair website.
The screen was choc full of drop-downs and check boxes that required you to make the correct choices either to save money on something you didn't want or just to make sure that you had paid for something that was definitely required. Consider the fact that I had wanted a luggage allowance but didn't want travel insurance. I somehow ended up doing a complete switcheroo on my choices despite being someone who is very comfortable with website interfaces and spends a fair amount of time designing or evaluating them.
My impression is that Ryanair are deliberating employing poor usability on their website booking interface to generate contextual misunderstanding by visitors. The net result of this is of course increased short term revenue as passengers are confronted with their errors at a point in time where they have little choice but to comply and pay the surcharge. Of course, the failing is mine as I made the mistake and had every chance to correct it had I double-checked my booking. Fair enough - but is it good practice to make your customers work so hard?
Also, just try changing a mistake in a Ryanair booking. It's not simple and it usually costs you more money. I mistakenly put down my wife's married name instead of her maiden name which features on her current passport. For fear that this might cause problems at the airport, I rang them up to get it changed after discovering that this could only be done via their premium rate customer number. You endure about 2 minutes worth of promotional guff before you get through to someone who informs you it wll be a further £9 for a few seconds of their time and some taps on a keyboard.
None of this is that surprising though. Ryanair and their pickpocket-in-chief, Michael O'Leary are well known for thinking of their passengers in the same way a farmer thinks of his livestock en route to market. There is a story about the Ryanair website that I have heard wherein O'Leary found that the quotes he had received from companies to build the website and it's online booking system too expensive so he hired a couple of guys straight out of college. When they had finished the work and sent O'Leary the bill for the agreed price of £17,000 - ridiculously cheap when you consider the revenue the site must have generated - he still knocked them down to £10,000.
