And the customer service award of the year goes to........
B+B owners in Cornwall
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
How far in advance can you print your boarding pass with Ryanair? If you can only do it 24 hours before the flight (which is the case with BA and, I think, Swiss) you're going to be stuffed (unless you take a printer on holiday with you).
Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...
Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...
I haven't used Ryanair for ages but just looking at some flight prices I note that an apparently compulsory "online checkin" fee of 12 euros each way is added. What's that about?
After all it is free
After all it is free
rob@rar,
14 Days IIRC....
Which can still be a pain, e.g. wife and kids usually spend over 2 weeks every summer at my parents farm back in southern France. So they can't check-in/print the pass for the return leg at home and my parents have no printer... Hence we have to go and borrow someone else's printer in the village..
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
pam w,
I think it's £6 each way..
It's about making money, how can you make one particular form of check-in "compulsory", and then charge people for using it? I am surprised they are allowed to do that.
The main thing with Ryanair is to look at the final price and see if that suits you. Ignore the in-between because it'll only get you confused or angry..
Ski the Net with snowHeads
Ski the Net with snowHeads
Kruisler wrote:
The main thing with Ryanair is to look at the final price and see if that suits you. Ignore the in-between because it'll only get you confused or angry..
Agreed. +1
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
geetee wrote:
Kruisler wrote:
The main thing with Ryanair is to look at the final price and see if that suits you. Ignore the in-between because it'll only get you confused or angry..
Agreed. +1
+ 2
If the service, treatment and apparent complete disdain of it's customers, were different, perhaps all these "in-between" things would make it worthwhile. As it is, Ryanair - at every level in which I have had experience - do indeed appear to "hate their own customers".
After the timing of two long-booked flights with Ryanair were changed, meaning one of the trips had to be cancelled as it simply wasn't worth it, I would never book with them again.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
Its probably worth hanging around the terminal with a PC and printer and charging a couple of quid to do it.
So if you're just off somewhere snowy come back and post a snow report of your own and we'll all love you very much
So if you're just off somewhere snowy come back and post a snow report of your own and we'll all love you very much
tiffin, there does seem to be some potential for money-making here. What would you do for power supply?
You know it makes sense.
You know it makes sense.
I love Ryanair. I agree, they do seem to hate their customers - or at least give some people the impression that they hate their customers, which clearly puts a lot off flying with them.
I don't see the point in cheap headline rates when everybody knows the final bill is much higher. But if it upsets you then you may be missing a bargain.
Not sure I'd use them to go skiing, though, given the chances of bad weather delaying flights and their customer service.
But they've taken me to places almost more cheaply* than a tube ticket, so can't complain.
*Yes, I know that means more expensively, but YKWIM!
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Its probably worth hanging around the terminal with a PC and printer and charging a couple of quid to do it.
tiffin, If check-in staff cottoned on to what you were doing, they'd probably have you thrown out of the terminal by the police as a security risk.
Last edited by Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name: on Wed 19-01-11 13:47; edited 1 time in total
Poster: A snowHead
Poster: A snowHead
rungsp, if you don't like it, don't fly with them . . . .there you go !! It's not a though they hide there approach or reputation.
Come on, it's not that difficult to take your ticket with you . . . . . .
Apparently the UK Borders Agency are turning people away who don't bring their passports - what a rip off
If I buy a ticket for a First Great Western traon to London and have it delivered to home in advance and then forget to take the ticket with me, they make my buy another - what a rip off
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
"Its probably worth hanging around the terminal with a PC and printer and charging a couple of quid to do it." ;
RY have thought of that one, you cannot print off pass, within 4 hours of flight
Have flown with RY many times over last few years, never delayed, used em to ski last few years when they had free ski carraige. Flew Aer Lingus first time in years, delayed because of mechanical failure !
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
and they fly to a range of small airports that other don't - which I find useful. And reliability of take-off time is better than EJ - who are nicer though.
Ryanair are the only airline I can feasibly use to visit my offshore inlaws, since they fly to an obscure provincial airport in Eastern Europe, which just happens to be rather close to where they live.
And they're one of the world's statistically most punctual airlines, I believe.
Luggage weight limits are shite, but what can you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
kendub wrote:
RY have thought of that one, you cannot print off pass, within 4 hours of flight
I don't ... and I don't. Dealing with Ryanair reminds me of playing with my obstreperous 8 year old cousin when I was twelve. The sole object seems to be to score petty points and prove their superiority over you according to their own twisted criteria.
If i really wanted to go somewhere, and Ryanair was the only viable way, and it was very very cheap, I might ... just .. consider it. I would rather walk TBH
Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...
Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...
They need to write some cunning code into their site which easyjet seem to have done today which freezes when you try to print boarding passes.
After all it is free
After all it is free
Never had any problems with Ryanair with probably up to 20 flights a year over about 10 years. I don't look forward to the occasion when say a serious delay causes problems as its reputation for dealing badly with that sort of thing may well be justified for all I know. But it's not happened yet. You need to know the rules: look at the final price not the bits and pieces as Kruisler rightly points out; print out your boarding pass (not a big issue - if I am away from home when I need to print out the return pass, there is no shortage of internet cafes around Europe); make sure your luggage is with the weight and dimensions limits; and get on the plane with a very high likelihood of arriving on or before time with the joy of hearing that hugely irritating fanfare .
As for the actual experience of flying. I have flown various airlines and quite honestly the only difference I notice is the blue and yellow livery. Everything else is much the same whoever I fly with. Whoever you fly with, you queue at security and divest yourself of shoes, belt, laptop etc; you queue at the gate to get on; you queue at the aircraft door; you wait for other punters to sit down before you can get yourself seated whether seats are allocated or not; you strap yourself in and off you go. Coffee and snacks come round either to be paid for or already paid for in your ticket (don't kid yourself they are ever "free"); they try to flog duty free and other crap; you land and get off. etc etc
The one difference can be price. Some of the fares I have paid on Ryanair are have been ridiculously cheap. It's not difficult to end up paying a lot more for a taxi from home to the airport than for your 1000+ mile journey.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
ccl wrote:
It's not difficult to end up paying a lot more for a taxi from home to the airport than for your 1000+ mile journey.
Especially when the airport is 50 odd miles from where you thought you were going.
We have had it before but got to be worth another viewing, it says it all.
It's not difficult to end up paying a lot more for a taxi from home to the airport than for your 1000+ mile journey.
Especially when the airport is 50 odd miles from where you thought you were going.
I do know where my home and my home airport are.
As for not checking where a destination airport is and how to get from it to where you want to be before booking , that's not very good planning is it, whatever airline you are travelling with? Mind you, it was a bit ridiculous when they used to have eg Barcelona (Girona) on the list of destinations: at least now it is Girona (Barcelona) which is a bit more honest.
IIRC one of their latest wheezes was to advertise (in Europe) Prestwick (near Glasgow) as a London airport!
Never flown with the feckers and never intend to!
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
We had a good experience with Ryanair last year. Turned up at Belfast City airport and couldn't find the printed boarding passes. The flight left in about 25 minutes..... Thought we would have a really, really, really hard time and have to pay the ridiculous price to check in at the airport for 4 of us.
Nice lady at the baggage drop printed the boarding passes and told us to hurry up.
We then spent 25 minutes in a queue at the gate waiting for the plane to arrive.
So if you're just off somewhere snowy come back and post a snow report of your own and we'll all love you very much
So if you're just off somewhere snowy come back and post a snow report of your own and we'll all love you very much
Anniepen wrote:
After the timing of two long-booked flights with Ryanair were changed, meaning one of the trips had to be cancelled as it simply wasn't worth it, I would never book with them again.
Same here, they claimed changing flights from out early Monday, back Saturday teatime to out Thurs late evening back Sat before breakfast time to be a minor change in timing!
You know it makes sense.
You know it makes sense.
Bristol airport now has a basic Internet café and printing facilities in the check-in area, presumably so that people can print off their boarding passes. (I doubt it's particularly cheap though.)
Both Ryanair and Easyjet prevent you from obtaining your boarding pass in the last couple of hours before your flight, but to work around that you should get it a few days earlier and save it to PDF (or maybe it even comes as a PDF, I don't recall). Then send yourself the PDF by e-mail. That way, you can access it at any time in order to print it. (Obviously, you'd print it from a normal Internet café or from home if you had the possibility, so this is just a back-up plan in case you lose the print-out or whatever.)
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
James the Last wrote:
.
I don't see the point in cheap headline rates when everybody knows the final bill is much higher. But if it upsets you then you may be missing a bargain.
But they've taken me to places almost more cheaply* than a tube ticket, so can't complain.
Agree, never flown with Ryanair before but I am going to BB7 with them from leeds-venice for £148. This is made up of £80 for ski carriage and £30 for 15kg of luggage, making my flight with all the spurious charges £38 return. My choice to take skis and pay £80. If I had paid £200 to a none budget airline and may have got ski carriage for free or certainly far less than £80, but overall it would be more expensive.
Poster: A snowHead
Poster: A snowHead
Kruisler wrote:
how can you make one particular form of check-in "compulsory", and then charge people for using it? I am surprised they are allowed to do that.
Because they don't always charge for it. There are regular special offer deals where the fee is waived. If they did always charge for it, they'd have to include it in their advertised prices, as per the results from various legal proceedings against them for misleading advertising.
alti - dude wrote:
Apparently the UK Borders Agency are turning people away who don't bring their passports - what a rip off. If I buy a ticket for a First Great Western traon to London and have it delivered to home in advance and then forget to take the ticket with me, they make my buy another - what a rip off.
Fail. A train ticket, though formally non-transferable, is in practice easily transferred and indeed often usable on whatever train the holder chooses to board. Hence the train company is hardly going to re-issue a ticket for you on the basis of your say-so. The passport control analogy doesn't stand up at all; if the UK had two acceptable pieces of ID (as indeed it recently did for a short while) and you forgot your passport then it would be acceptable to use your other ID instead.
The boarding pass, on the other hand, is practically non-transferable since your name is printed on it and you're obliged to carry ID which presumably matches the name. Additionally, you're booked onto one very specific flight. Hence Ryanair knows perfectly well that you're booked onto that flight, and so, given that you can provide ID, you shouldn't need a boarding pass at all. (It seems to me that the boarding pass charade is, as usual, partly about the "security" circus directly, but mainly about shifting responsibility within the security circus away from one group of people and onto another. To be fair, it's also a practical measure to reduce queuing time at the boarding gate.)
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Do they accept a PDF boarding pass displayed on one's iPhone? Just in case one doesn't have access to a printer. Not that I'm ever likely to fly with Ryanair but it would be nice to know these things. I've done it with train tickets before, i.e. showed iPhone with booking confirmation to pick up tickets on the day.
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Pyremaniac, try turning up with a cheap advanced booking on First Great Western (ie the Ryanair version) and get on the previous or next train to the one you are booked on. Love seeing the looks on students' faces on the train out of London when the 'Train Manager' looks at their £15 advance ticket to Bristol, they are not on the train they are booked on and they have to pay the full £80 normal fare. (NB for the pedants, these are made up numbers). Not transferable !!
Passport analogy does stack up - point is you are required to bring ID to enter the UK and if you don't comply with the rules you ain't coming in.
Basic issue is Ryanair/Easyjet is trying to get us eventually to move to hand baggage only (unless you pay for baggage) and no check in staff - they are appealing to one part of the market and differentiating on price rather than service. I for one don't see air ravel as a fun and interesting experience to look forward to but just a coach/train the the sky for 1.5 hours so happy for frills to be taken out so I can spend my cash on much more rewarding experiences up the mountains. Each to their own of course.
I will be traveling with Easyjet today - I have my hand baggage packed, boarding card out and back printed and Passport (correctly dated) in my bag, iTouch loaded with a few episodes of Spooks. Less than £80 return and I wont need to queue to check in and will turn up 40 mins before scheduled departure - happy chap. Having flown Easyjet and BA quite a lot, I do feel Easyjet are more determined to get off on time and telling 'customers' to hurry up and sit down and BA are a bit more 'sit down when you get round to it'. Not sure if the stats back it up and I suspect any stats are clouded by the types of flights the 2 operate.
I personally don't use Ryanair as Easyjet are that notch above them in service/flexibility if things go wrong (me wanting to change flights) or flights being cancelled because of things like snow and price is the same.
Some of my friends who 'like the airport experience' and 'want a bit more comfort' for and hour and a half use BA out of T5 and pay £250 return - their choice and we are all happy.
I think the problem with a boarding pass on a laptop or iPhone would be that security might not be able to scan the barcode. Then there would be the problem at the gate too where a part of a boarding pass is usually detached and kept by the dispatchers presumably as part of their checks that the right number of people are on a flight. I don't reckon on bits of my laptop being torn off.
Don't know although I have, like you, wondered if it would work as a last resort.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
queen bodecia, some airlines are introducing mobile boarding passes - i have done this with Swiss. i think BA might be bringing it in too
queen bodecia, some airlines are introducing mobile boarding passes - i have done this with Swiss. i think BA might be bringing it in too
BA do it already via an iPhone app (I assume they have an Android one as well).
Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...
Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...
Won't fly Ryanair on principle, despite the fact that my wife's uncle is a pilot for them. Their attitude to their customers is unacceptable and on the couple of occasions that I've got a quote, they've not been especially cheap.
Their booking system is laughable; why oh why do they persist in publishing 'fares' that bear no resemblance to what you actually pay? That probably makes me most angry of all: the sense that the airline a) thinks you're a moron and b) is trying to swindle you.
Unfortunately Flybe - who are very convenient for me - have started doing the same thing. I've complained repeatedly and got family and friends to boycott them for both leisure and business travel. Don't see why we should just sit there and take it.
At least Sleazyjet start you off with a fare that vaguely resembles what you finally pay - and don't charge you £10 per passenger to use a debit card, when there's no sensible alternative.
After all it is free
After all it is free
Pyremaniac, alti - dude, maybe I have missed the point here but I would have said that the difference between trains and planes is that when you go by train you only need a ticket but when you fly you are issued with a ticket (that you could print out anytime before you leave for your return journey) and then for each leg of that journey you then have to print a boarding pass which you can print when you check-in online. The airline ticket won't get you on board, only the boarding pass. Did I read that you can check-in online up to two weeks in advance with Ryanair? However, if you are away for over two weeks then unless you have easy access to a printer you have to faff around trying to find somewhere to print off a boarding pass and are not allowed on board even if you have printed off your valid ticket.
I think I will continue to avoid flying Ryanair unless it's an absolute last resort.
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I find this whole issue very strange - what is the point of a boarding pass nowadays? In the "old days" of budget airlines, when you booked you got a booking reference or e-ticket, when you actually turned up at checkin they gave a boarding pass, so the boarding passes issued matched the number of people expecting to fly on that flight - all reasonably sensible.
Now though - if you can print a boarding pass 2 weeks in advance it is no indication at all of who is at the airport waiting to fly. Why then cannot your booking reference email, or e-ticket be a boarding pass as well that you print when you book? Would be much simpler and stop a lot of this hassle both for the carriers and the customers.
Ski the Net with snowHeads
Ski the Net with snowHeads
RobinS, the boarding pass is scanned at the gate, and tells them exactly who is on the plane, and if they are missing any passengers, who it is they have to page.
It is very true it is no indication of who is actually at the airport, but the more important reason always was the gate processing. Now that is the only reason.
Oh, plus the fact that you don't get through security without a boarding pass.
FAQ
Poster: A snowHead
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