Ryanair doesn’t allow you to login online for printing tickets with just PNR - they require email for 2fa. Which you don’t get when booking via third party. Got caught by this while travelling with a party of 6. €120 down the drain. Third party sheds any responsibility.
For more than this; their prices make no sense; way too low. Somewhere corners are cut which probably makes it an illegal operation when they look closer. Which will happen by EU countries or the EU itself.
But yeah, I never fly with them; uncomfortable, annoying, only Boeings etc. I’ll pay more, it’s fine.
I was caught by this surprise pricing once, so I'll explain: printing a boarding pass at the airport is €20, but that's only if you have checked in online beforehand.
But checking in in-person is €0 only if there's more than 2 hours left until the planned departure, it is €55 if there is less. So in practice, a lot of people end up paying €75 for something that's free when flying with other airlines.
In Ryanair's defence, they explain it on their site. But if you are booking via e.g. Kiwi.com, you will probably never visit Ryanair's site and you will miss this detail.
The way I parse them is if you're flying anywhere, unless it's from Morocco or specific airports listed in their FAQ then you don't need to physically print your boarding pass as long as you can pull it up on your phone. This would include foreign travelers such as someone from the US who is flying between countries in the EU based on there not being an explicit call out for that.
If you buy from certain resellers, these won't share the necessary login details with you to load the boarding pass into the official app.
Ryanair's app (unlike other airlines') intentionally does not allow loading a boarding pass/reservation using just your name and reservation code to discourage these third-party resellers – at the expense of their customers.
Moreover, if you arrive at the airport 3 hours before but spend one hour in the check-in queue, you will fall into the two hours time window and pay 50 EUR for effectively having the boarding pass printed.
A court in Vienna previously ruled against them, but they just ignore that everywhere else.
RyanAir's business model is hyper-aggressive penny-pinching on basically everything that allows pinching pennies.
The costs are so high because they want to really really disincentive people from using staff for this kind of thing, so on average they won't have to hire as much staff.
This is one reason why some RyanAir flights can be as low as €20 (whereas e.g. KLM is €200 for a similar or identical flight).
On bigger airports it's not a huge problem because you can typically use the machines, which are free.
Yup. I think it was approximately 150€ when this happened to me.
There's even an entire second-order cottage industry benefiting from that practice: At the airport I was trying to board, there was a copyshop offering PDF printouts for 50 cent a page (yay) – except if the page is a boarding pass, for which the rate is then 10€.
Yes, they employ a person to specifically check what you're printing...
I'd be more sympathetic to that view if Ryanair didn't
- Prohibit showing the QR code from a PDF on your phone (it has to be printed on physical paper, or you have to use the app instead)
- Make it intentionally hard/impossible to get your boarding pass bought from a third-party reseller into their first-party app
In other words, my "non-real issue" was entirely manufactured by Ryanair to extract more money from me (by frustrating third-party resellers without outright banning them in a way that makes them prone to competitive lawsuits)
How much do you have to pay to get to the point where 100€ would be anything remotely close to the actual costs? If your support person is literally doing nothing 59/60ths of the time (because they're waiting around for someone to help), and it takes a whole minute to print a ticket... you're still at 100€/hour.
This doesn't seem like it can be anything but ripping people off for making a mistake, or as charitably as I can possibly get making people who made a mistake subsidize flights for the more meticulous people in an attempt to make tickets (appear to) cost less to get more business.
