How do these people make a virtue of being whatever is the opposite of customer-centric?
I have a cheapo holiday booked to Fuerteventura after Christmas. At least it stated off cheapo. I have already paid an extra £50 to take one piece of hold baggage (no, not herself, she has a seat). The flights are Ryanair from Luton which is reasonably near here.
The travel docs have just come through, including a How-To-Check-In-With-Ryanair-Because-They-Are-A-Law-Unto-Themselves section.
If we don't print boarding passes ahead of time then they basically fine us £45 each. Fair enough, for the outbound flights we can check in between four days and two hours before departure. Ditto for the return flights. The problem is that we are going for 7 nights, and I do not intend to take a printer with me.
If we cough up to pre-book specific seats then we can check in up to 30 days in advance. The minimum cost of that is €8 per seat each way, which does not include priority boarding so our cabin baggage will probably be chucked in the hold.
Of course if I had booked the flights myself rather than as part of a package I would have had full visibility of this. I'm not letting it wind me up, but what a racket!
Next step, google "how to use Ryanair".
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Never flown with them, always seem to end up flying with easy jet, either with work or for myself.
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Just download the Ryanair App on your phone and use Mobile boarding pass. No paper required.
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When we last flew with Ryanair we had the return flight boarding pass issue. I did have the app and would have used that. Got up in time to print the return boarding passes before we left for the airport.
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>> When we last flew with Ryanair we had the return flight boarding pass issue. I
>> did have the app and would have used that. Got up in time to print
>> the return boarding passes before we left for the airport.
You took a printer with you? Or scraped in at home before you left? It used to be 7 days, it's now 4.
I had seen that there is a mobile app, CG. I'd prefer paper, mobiles being prone to flat batteries, breakage etc, but I'll probably use it. I hope I can get both passes on one phone, hers is a Windows job for which there is no app.
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>> Or scraped in at home before you left? It used to be 7 days, it's now 4.
It might have been 7 days when we last flew Ryanair - it was over the Easter 2015 period. Which itself was a drop from the previous cut-off when we'd flown Ryanair before. But I printed before leaving home.
I'd have to use the app next time if it's now 4 days. Or EasyJet. :-)
Last edited by: rtj70 on Fri 16 Dec 16 at 22:18
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Does using the app to check in require an internet connection? I guess so - not everyone has one when abroad, and some hotels either don't, or they may charge for it. Still there are MacDonalds in most touristy places now.. :-)
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Not many places in Europe when you can't source a WiFi connection theses days least of all at airport. Using an electronic boarding pass via the App really is no big deal. We are in an an age of change, everything is going Electronic from shopping to banking, from managing your utility bills to paying your bus fare. You just need to accept it and go with it. You can't fight it.
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I know, I am only really rarely without data as much of my life is managed through my phone. But not all are like that, and/or not all might realise that data connection is required to do the boarding pass thing.
While you can usually get a WiFi connection in hotels and airports it isn't always free, or a free one isn't always reliable.
Anyway waiting until you reach the airport to check in online is a bit pointless, you may as well stride up to the desk.
Last edited by: smokie on Sat 17 Dec 16 at 11:46
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Earlier this year, at Luton, I was queueing at security when the guy in front had his Phone based barcodes refused. As I have always relied on paper copies because of the risk of problems i quizzed the operative if only to to justify my approach :) ; his only reply was that it is not unusual, but c(w)ould not quantify. Ryanair will print for free if you go back to physical desk apparently, but not something you would want to happen if time was tight.
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>> Does using the app to check in require an internet connection?
>>
Where on earth is data going to cost £45 (Manatee said "don't print boarding passes ahead of time then they basically fine us £45 each")?
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A few observations. In the past I've managed to get hotels to print documents for me, for example on Tenerife one time, though it wasn't boarding passes.
I agree the whole check-in thing sounds like a cynical exercise in exploiting customers, for which Ryanair has an unenviable reputation. So far, I have succeeded in avoiding patronising them, a resolution hardened by their treatment of a friend who had the misfortune to lose her passport in Florence, but who had done the right thing in getting a temporary travel document from the British consulate. It can't have been an unheard-of situation, but our lovely Irish airline put every difficulty in her path.
You may well know what you're doing with Luton Airport, but if not, beware problems getting to departures on time no matter what mode of transport you use - all due to the road bottleneck on the final stretch of the route. I'll be happy to advise if necessary - it's our local airport (10 miles or so away), I use it several times a year and am in and out of Luton for other reasons at least twice a week.
Last edited by: Focal Point on Fri 16 Dec 16 at 19:53
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Chuffing Nora, haven't they sorted that access road out yet? It must be 5 years since I used it and it was horrible then.
I do not have fond memories of Luton. Apart from the congested access, which also holds up the car park buses (or used to) they "lost" my car for me once. In fact the car was where I left it. I had only been gone for a day, during which time they had moved the bus shelter I parked it next to by about 100 yards.
The conjunction of Luton and Ryanair probably means I should get hypnotherapy before setting off to avoid PTSD.
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Traffic problems at Luton Airport are of course not new. Since they re-built the access road from the M1, traffic gets off the motorway much faster, both into south Luton and to the airport, but everything narrows down to the final single carriageway to the terminal, where there are now fresh works to reconfigure the drop-off point and the on-site car-parking, as well as some of the buildings. So it all depends on how congested that is. No matter whether you take a taxi, use the transfer bus from the rail station, or off-site parking, everything can grind to a halt.
There's no alternative to ensuring you're there much earlier than you would assume or would like. We just resign ourselves to killing a lot of time in the terminal before boarding. Not the best start to a holiday.
It's not surprising that Luton is one of the least popular airports.
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Never had any problems with Ryanair but then I always book seats in advance as I like an aisle seat.
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>> Never had any problems with Ryanair but then I always book seats in advance as
>> I like an aisle seat.
I used them quite a lot for a period when I was travelling back and forth to Turin. That was in the days before allocated seating, with the big scramble to get aboard which I tried not to join in. Travelling alone it never bothered me. Aisle seats for me too. I might do pre-booked anyway, as it's not a particularly short flight to the budgies.
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Oh well. It's a 7.30 departure so we'll be early anyway, and it's a Saturday.
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"It's a 7.30 departure so we'll be early anyway."
That's probably as good a time to fly as any. I notice that for tomorrow (17/12/16 - a Saturday) only six departures are scheduled before 07:30. It shouldn't be too busy.
Last edited by: Focal Point on Fri 16 Dec 16 at 21:19
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>> "It's a 7.30 departure so we'll be early anyway."
>>
>> That's probably as good a time to fly as any. I notice that for tomorrow
>> (17/12/16 - a Saturday) only six departures are scheduled before 07:30. It shouldn't be too
>> busy.
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Only 6 flights scheduled before 7.30~?????
tinyurl.com/jcfywh7 - links to www.flightstats.com
Last time I was there in the summer it was heaving at 6.30!
link shortened to restore correct page width.
Last edited by: VxFan on Sat 17 Dec 16 at 17:50
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"Only 6 flights scheduled before 7.30~?????"
That's what was shown yesterday evening when I checked. Most were Wizz Air to eastern Europe, which tends to have early departures.
"Last time I was there in the summer it was heaving at 6.30!"
Possibly because there were a lot of chartered departures. Manatee should be OK in January, I would have thought.
Our worst recent experience, as regards crowding, was flying out at lunchtime last September. The place was indeed absolutely heaving. We chose to arrive by train and shuttle bus, which of course was caught in the traffic snarl-up in the last half-mile or so.
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When I returned to Luton last summer after one of my many holidays :-) there had been an accident in the approach road. The valet parking people said to sit tight in the airport for an hour or so, as even once it had cleared they had a backlog and all their drivers were in the wrong place. I think it took nearly 3 hours to get our car back.
And the place is like a permanent building site, inside and out (speaking from wide experience of two return flights from there over the years :-) )
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Because I posted a long link it was helpfully shortened. The original link showed around 30 flights between 06.00 and 07.30 this (Saturday) morning.
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You don't have to pay to get a seat of your choice on Ryanair. They will tell you that seats are allocated at random at check in.
They are not selected at random.
I was guided by this website: www.traveltime.info/?p=120
The guy is perfectly correct, I poked around a couple of flights this way and if you are prepared to wait and see where the previous allocated supposedly random seats are you can get to sit more or less where you want to by predicting what comes next. Very roughly speaking the row in the centre of the plane goes first then, IIRC, the selection jumps 2 rows forward and then 2 rows behind the centre row and keeps hopping front and back in a similar fashion. Look at the link for the proper details.
The last time I flew Ryanair it worked as predicted and I sat where I wanted.
Yes, it's time consuming, but it feels good to get one over Mr O'Leary.
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Seems a desperate way to save eight quid.
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Sounds incredibly complex. I tried to read it but couldn't manage it.
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>> Because I posted a long link it was helpfully shortened. The original link showed around
>> 30 flights between 06.00 and 07.30 this (Saturday) morning.
I still have access to the original long link you posted. It takes me to exactly the same place as the shortened link which was substituted in.
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Vx - sorry! I had not realised the length of that link created a problem and genuinely thought it contained time slot info.
There appears to be a problem with that site - if you go via the short link it shows only 6 flights (as OP found), but if you update the info fields and submit it shows 30 odd flights!
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Ryanair, check in and boarding passes - sooty123
