Ryanair have now extended their reserved seating to cover all flights – but the service is still only available for the first two rows and for the extra legroom seats by the over-wing emergency exits.
The service costs €10 per person per flight sector. Other passengers can still pay €5 for priority boarding.
Does this make you any more likely to fly with Ryanair?
Whenever Ryanair start cheap flights to somewhere new, we always wonder whether or not they are also trying to appeal to passengers to use their new airport as an alternative to an existing major city airport.
Sometimes they will make a big song and dance about it (e.g. Memmingen for Munich), even when the alternative is ambitious at best. Yet sometimes, the opposite can be the case – Ryanair may not actively promote a destination as being an alternative, but passengers might still use it, especially if the main city airport is congested or expensive to fly into.
So, is Turku a realistic ‘Helsinki West’?
In many ways, even if it is, this is only in supplement to Ryanair’s long established flights to Tampere – with both cities being just under a 2 hours drive away from Helsinki. Although the train journey from Turku to Helsinki is also around 2 hours, the journey from Tampere is a faster run – taking just 90 minutes.
Despite these short distances, there are actually operational flight routes between Helsinki and both Turku and Tampere, operated by Flybe Nordic on behalf of Finnair. So this would be a rare case of a Ryanair alternative city actually being so far away from the other city that you can actually fly over the distance. Yet, on the face of it, these extremely short internal flights seem utterly pointless – a bit like Flybe operating flights from Birmingham to Gatwick, and exactly the sort of thing that would get Friends of the Earth hopping mad.
So is there really a big cost saving by taking ‘cheap’ flights to Tampere or Turku instead? Going on base prices, Ryanair offer little saving over fierce Nordic rivals Fly Norwegian, especially as the latter does not charge for hidden extras like debit car payments. Unfortunately, the market for budget flights to Helsinki is not as competitive as it has been, now that easyJet no longer offer any flights to Finland, and Blue1 just offer flights to Helsinki from Edinburgh.
Helsinki Airport lags behind its Scandinavian rivals in that Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm airports all have fast and direct rail links to their respective city centres. Yet, even on the slow bus, it is still far easier to get to the centre of Helsinki from Helsinki airport than from the other two.
In fact, the question should really be the other way round – to what extent is Helsinki airport still the best option for reaching Turku, Tampere and other cities in southern Finland which have airports? In the case of Tampere, you can even take a short (10-15 minute) bus or taxi ride to nearby Tikkurila station, from where the train to Tampere takes just 75 minutes.
As with any destination, it is always worth mixing and matching in and outbound flights, so you can see both cities for not much more (and sometimes even less) than the price of visiting one. Considering that Helsinki Vantaa Airport is a delightful icon of Finnish design, we would suggest flying into Turku or Tampere and out of Helsinki.
Coventry Airport has restarted freight flights, and still has stated ambitions to relaunch passenger flights.
Flightmapping MD Mark Avery was on BBC CWR, discussing the future of the airport.
One possible airline which might be interested in Coventry flights is Jet2, which has slowly been marching south from its well established network of bases in the north (including Scotland and Northern Ireland).
Another speculation would be that easyJet might be interested in starting flights from either Birmingham or Coventry, and that it would be seeking to squeeze the best deal out of whichever airport was most receptive to its demands.
Birmingham Airport might have spare capacity, but it already has a good offering from no-frills airlines, ranging from the bargain basement low cost flights offered by Ryanair, through to mid-market low cost airlines like bmibaby and Monarch, topped off by Flybe, who offer a strong network of domestic routes from Birmingham, together with some flights to key European business and leisure destinations.
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has confirmed plans to get rid of two of the three toilets which are fitted as ‘bog’ standard on its Boeing 737-800 aircraft.
What Ryanair Toilets will look like if they go down to one per plane
On the surface of it, this seems like a clever idea – on Ryanair’s shortest routes, like its London to Dublin hops, it is very rare to see all toilets used at the same time. This move will send out the message that Ryanair are even more keen to be seen as a company which operates buses with wings, rather than full service aircraft, so this will encourage people to use the toilets inside the airport terminals.
The move is subject to certification from Boeing.
Of course, this move will cause concern for people with medical conditions that make them need to use the toilet more – at least with two toilets, there should be one free if the other is occupied, but cutting back to one could make things difficult.
The promise is that these changes will only be applied on aicraft which operate the very shortest routes, but it is worth remembering that Ryanair have a single fleet policy, meaning that any aircraft could be use to operate any route at any time, including longer flights down to destinations like the Canary Islands or Greece.
I wouldn’t want to be caught short on one of those flights.
Passengers wanting to avoid the extortionate card handling fees charged by Ryanair will now have to use Ryanair’s own Cash passport from 1 November onwards. This further restricts the payment options for people who don’t want to pay these fees, as up until this date, any prepaid MasterCard was acceptable. So how does the Ryanair Cash passport compare with other cards? Many people have been quick to criticise the outrageously high foreign usage fees (5.75%) this card has, or the £2.50 monthly inactivity fee, but both of these are easily avoidable. Consumer group Which has also dismissed this card, saying that they would rather wait for the day when the government bans airlines from charging extra fees for paying by debit card. That might be something many consumers would welcome, but until (and if) it happens, people will still want to find out the best way of paying for their flights.
To start using the card, passengers must transfer at least £150 in funds, and pay a £6 card activation free, which is refunded in Ryanair travel vouchers (no further fee for using these). The Ryanair Cash passport is managed by Access prepaid worldwide, a subsidiary of Mastercard.
Passengers book flights in the normal way, but unlike all other payment methods, they will not incur any handling fees for flights booked using this card. The card can be topped up online using a UK debit card, and there is no fee for this, and unlike some other prepaid cards, there is also no monthly usage fee, providing the card is used at least once every six months.
Usage
After first of April 2012, transactions using Ryanair’s Cash passport in the UK will attract a fee of 50p. A non-usage fee of £2.50 will be applied if the card is not active for a period of six months, much to the consternation of many Internet commentators. However, these comments are misguided. Many prepaid MasterCards have a monthly usage fee, which applies whether you use the card or not. All you have to do to avoid any ongoing fees were the Ryanair Cash passport is just make sure you use the card in the UK at least once every six months. That sounds reasonable to us.
Foreign transactions
Again, much of the criticism at the Ryanair Cash passport has been because it attracts a whopping 5.75% transaction fee for any usage abroad. Sure, this is outrageously expensive, but the whole point of having this card is to avoid Ryanair’s extortionate card handling fees, not to get the best rates on using your card abroad — something which is also highly unlikely that your bank will offer anyway. The Ryanair Cash passport is denominated in Sterling, not in euros, so, like Sterling travellers cheques, it makes little sense to expect to use this abroad anyway, as there are plenty of much better value cards available which are denominated in euros, so you know exactly where you stand in terms of costs.
Are there are other ways of avoiding Ryanair’s extortionate card handling charges?
Ryanair vouchers
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the Ryanair voucher is one of them. Firstly, you will have to pay a £5 administration fee to buy the voucher, which is only £1 less than the usual card fee. Vouchers can only be used once, so if you’re booking flights which cost less than the value of the voucher, you will lose the difference. If your flights cost more than the voucher value, then you will have to pay the difference, and unsurprisingly this difference will then attract the very handling fees you are trying to avoid. So in that respect, the voucher is lose-lose.
The vouchers can only be used by the named beneficiary, so that they are much less flexible than a prepaid MasterCard which can be used to book flights for anyone. However, there is one potential advantage of paying by voucher, and that is that a handling fee is only levied once for the cost of the voucher, whereas Ryanair’s credit card booking fees are levied on each individual flight sector, so a couple making a return trip will have to pay four times. This theoretically makes the vouchers a better way of paying than a credit or debit card, but you would still have to predict the exact cost that your Ryanair flights are going to come to in order to make the vouchers worthwhile, and this can be extremely tricky as the yield management system used by Ryanair and all other low-cost airlines means that prices can rise and fall at a moments notice. Why go to all this trouble, and still pay a handling fee, when you can avoid a handling fee using Ryanair’s Cash passport?
Of course, we’d hate to live in a world where every single corporation dictated the rules of how you pay them, but luckily very few companies behave like Ryanair. As long as Ryanair’s business model makes it possible to explore all kinds of unique corners of Europe at a cost which is often many times cheaper than their rivals, then this hassle is something that will be worth tolerating.
What about the Ryanair credit card?
The Ryanair credit card, managed by Santander bank, promises to reward users with up to 5 return flight vouchers during the first year. Users must still pay all applicable taxes fees and charges for the flight they wish to take, and unlike Ryanair vouchers, payers by Ryanair credit card will still attract a handling fee of six pounds per person per flight sector, which is no different to payment by any other card.
So why bother with a Ryanair credit card? The terms and conditions clearly state that these free flights will only available on selected routes, and that there will also be many blackout periods when the free flights will not be available. Considering how many times Ryanair launches special offers, we think that these free flights are of little use, so you might as well just to check for the latest special offers like any other passenger.
From the way we see it, the Ryanair credit card is merely an extension of the Ryanair moneymaking machine, and little benefit to consumers. On the other hand, the Ryanair cash passports let’s Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary paint himself as being the one in the temple, throwing over the tables of the money-changing rip-off banks, who he says are the route cause of his airline charging such high payment fees. Yet the much despised British banks still let you trade with them on your terms – take none of their add-on services and don’t go overdrawn, and they are still free to use. Ryanair meanwhile will continue to dictate the terms on which you do business with it, because for the time being at least, it still can.
Update 6th Oct – the card application page is now live. Note that the card is offered by Raphaels Bank, not Access Worldwide.
According to this Bloomberg report, Ryanair and Wizzair are interested in operating new cheap flights to Greece, by setting up a base in Thessaloniki.
This follows on from Ryanair launching a selected range of flights to Greece over the last few years, although they have so far avoided main Greek city destinations. We don’t expect to see Ryanair offering flights to Athens any time soon, as it is seen as one of Europe’s higher cost airports – although Easyjet are already well established there.
Still wondering how Michael O’Leary is going to respond to the new Berlin Airport.
Will he accept a rise in charges, or will he try and operate from the old SXF terminal.
It is quite unprecedented for a city to effectively shut 3 airports to build one new one (Boris take note?). The closest alternative will be Leipzig ‘Berlin South’ – LEJ. A mere 176km away – a stretch even for the Ryanair boss’ imagination!