My brother and I have been talking about going to Morocco for a while, but we’ve never got round to booking. There’s an element of being cheapskates here, especially as Morocco is Ryanair’s only non-European destination, and it falls within the higher tax band. My cunning plan was to skip this tax difference by flying out through Gibraltar, and then taking the ferry.
This was as much about enjoying the journey as it was about keeping Gordon and Alistair’s mitts off my cash - sure, I don’t want them to have any more of it than necessary, but there’s no point in paying more for something just because you think it is taxed less.
So the Ryanair price ‘index’ isn’t quite down to zero at the moment - the confusing ‘80% off our best fares’ doesn’t really mean much, when their cheapest fares are 1p - so are they now going to split the penny and offer me a flight for 0.2p? What the best deal actually meant was that the cheapest flights to Europe started from £3 - but their flights to Marrakech in Morocco were advertised at £34, from either Luton (much easier for my brother) or East Midlands (Coventry is fairly even between the two, but Luton is actually easier to get to on public transport).
So when clicking through to the results page, they have flights going down to £9.99, where the taxes and charges add up to £43, but they also have flights at just £10, and that is all you pay, full stop. Is this a glitch - I somewhat doubt it, that’s not Ryanair’s way of working. Is it a bargain - yeah, and return flights were also available a week later for just £10.
My brother had to get back to work a few days beforehand, and I have a concert to go to which made the £10 deal impossible. This is where Ryanair’s seemingly low fares suddenly rack up - the £9.99 flight working out at £45 with all the charges. So, time to head over to Easyjet to check out the price of that flight back from Gibraltar - £51 all in. For £6 more, I’m getting to enjoy flying out and back through different airports, and my Morocco trip should now include Casablanca aswell as Tangier. There will be a few extras for the train up to Tangier and the ferry to Algeciras, but for me that’s all part of the fun.
Happy travels!
*Note - ‘all in’ includes mandatory taxes and charges - in this case, I paid no fee for online check-in. Both of us are travelling without hand luggage, and I paid using my Co-op Visa Electron card.