HOW TO SURVIVE RYANAIR’S NEW RULES

THE business model of many firms nowadays is to offer low prices and then make profits with extra charges.

But Ryanair is absolute an master of these dark arts.

Earlier this year the airline introduced a charge for priority boarding – or else you can’t bring a sizeable bag into the cabin or be specially seated beside your companion.

Ryanair told us that the new rule would cost it €50m and was introduced in order to ‘eliminate boarding delays caused due to too many bags being brought on board’.

Really? So a company that worships profit comes up with a plan to lose €50m doing something its passengers don’t really want?

And how come there are so many boarding delays when in the next breath the spokesman boasted of the airline’s ‘industry-leading on-time departures?’

Every time I fly with Ryanair, I try to keep calm. We all know the deal. It charges low fares and you pay extra for everything else. So why get worked up about it? But it’s only when you experience the new rules, as I did last week on a trip to Italy, that you realise how petty they can be.

The length of cabin bag that non-priority passengers can bring on board is 35cm. My laptop measures 37cm, so it’s too big. I brought it anyway and wasn’t challenged.

Ryanair staff are decent human beings and they don’t always enforce its rules quite as strictly as Michael O’Leary, pictured, would like. But even if they don’t, the prospect of a tape-wielding stewardess evicting your laptop into the hold is stressful.

With the new seating arrangements, Ryanair claims it does not deliberately separate passengers.

It doesn’t have to. Maths takes care of that. There are more than six million ways of seating three people randomly on a plane with 189 seats; but there are just 378 ways of seating these three people together, according to Jonquil Lowe, senior lecturer in economics and personal Finance at The Open University. This means there is a one-in-17,578 – or 0.006 per cent – chance that a family of three would be seated in a row, her figures show.

There are 35,532 ways of seating two people randomly in 189 seats – and only 252 ways to seat them together. This leaves a one-in-141 chance of a couple finding themselves seated side-byside.

Lo and behold, on my trip, I was separated by half the plane from my partner. But there were a couple of empty seats next to mine so we just sat together anyway.