It’s since December, that Ryanair has been boasting their new ‘kinder’ policy toward their customers/cattle. Among other things, their arrogant boss Michael O’Leary has been promising a new wonderful web site and ‘fully allocated seating’.
Having been forced to the pain of flying with those rascals for years, when I first heard the news, I thought: we’ll see, sounds too good, to be true.
And in fact, yet more lies, yet another scam.
The web site has slightly changed, now you can register as user and save a few details, such as your home address. If you’re a frequent flier, that’s valuable, but overall, it is still confusing and misleading. For instance, no way to record your passport details and use them to check-in on line. But OK, maybe this just the begin and they’ll enhance it more, let’s wait and ignore the same sucking site has been here for so many years already.
But undoubtedly the ‘allocated seating’ thing is another LyingAir cheat. What it actually means is that you have to pay a minimum 5£, unless you want their computers to assign you a seat randomly, 7 days before taking off, i.e., to have a high chance of getting a crap seat in the middle of a 3-seat block and in a crap position, such as the last row or over the wing. Before, you could opt to go to the gate very early and race to get a good seat. Now it’s impossible in practice, either you pay 5quid more, or you’ll get rubbish seating. And no, there’s no way to be sure of seating next to your company, unless to pay and book.
Of course, 5£ is not much, but, as usually, it’s the principle, the misleading marketing and the trickery way to come to a de-facto fee increase, smuggling it for an improvement (an increase that is also cheating on the competition, since such ‘optional’ fees don’t appear on the base flight price, a figure into which other airlines normally include true allocated seating). It’s also that I strongly hate to give more money to them, being already forced to be their customers, due to the fact that their heavily occupy many small airports around Europe, taking them as their hostages and keeping their competition out, in a very unfair way.
I’ve always said it, these thieves will arrogantly keep exploiting the herds, until some anti-trust authority comes to grips with them, forces them to stop their cheating policies and to release the monopole they have on entire European regions, such as the Adriatic coast in Italy.
