What a carry-on! Here’s a better way to handle Ryanair’s baggage fees
Ryanair, the low-cost airline, is at it again. We’ve been threatened with an on-board lavatory charge (thankfully revoked), and slapped with a new £5 surcharge per passenger for taking our (regulation size!) hand-luggage wheelies on board with us.
Why, we rage, as we board our £12 weekend flights to Perpignan and Baden-Baden, does Ryanair hate us so much?
Despite this vexing backdrop, nothing prepared us for the bombshell that dropped last week when Jennifer Rogers, an Oxford statistician who got hold of Ryanair’s seating plans, forced the airline to admit that it “tries to keep window and aisle seats free” when “randomly” allocating seats.
Rogers got researchers to book four seats on four flights, and every seat allocated was a middle seat. The chances of this happening turn out to be very small indeed: you’re more than ten times more likely to win the National Lottery. Fury duly mounted: was the airline deliberately splitting up groups, so that they would have to pay to sit together?
It is common practice on low-cost airlines to have to pay to select seats, but normally
groups on a single booking are seated together.
Frankly, I don’t care. All this indignation is a bit pathetic. The Ryanairs of this world are the best thing to happen to us, opening up vast swathes of Europe, Africa and the Middle East – for next to nothing. Their business model may lack niceties, but if it works for them then by golly it works for us, too; life has been transformed by the ability to nip to Marrakesh or Lisbon for under £35.
Throwing a fit is pointless; I’d be surprised if the rigidseeming flight attendants and ground staff are paid nearly enough to give much of a toss about our frustration.
The better response is to deploy the “don’t get mad, get even” philosophy – in other words, to play the system. I dodge having my wheelie confiscated at the gate and put in the hold by simply ripping off the luggage tag as soon as my ticket has been checked (the guys on the runway don’t care).
I’ve also been known to conceal my extra and verboten piece of hand-luggage, from tote to backpack, in a WHSmith or Boots bag bought in duty free.
Above all, enjoy it while it lasts. Ryanair and co have made a ticket to Vienna or Stockholm cheaper than a round at your local. I think that more than makes up for a bit of meanspiritedness here and there.