Last night, I decided to have a last-minute attempt at booking some flights using Ryanair’s £5 ‘all-inclusive’ offer. I gave myself one target — that I would only spend £5 in each direction, regardless of where I went, but that I must find flights from Birmingham, as to depart from any other UK airport would mean burdening myself with a whole load of unnecessary costs getting to and from the airport.
To add to the complexity, I usually like to fly into one airport, travel around for a bit, and then fly back from somewhere different. Italy was already high up my wish list, and Ryanair’s special offer page had a number of Northern Italian destinations available from Birmingham, in addition to Olbia in Sardinia. The simplest pair of airports was going to be Pisa and Bologna, but would it be possible to find flights going out through one and back through the other for the £10 target? If I couldn’t do that, would it at least be possible to find return flights to Pisa or Bologna?
I was looking for cheap flights in early April, as I have a fairly heavy workload in March, and am then supposed to be training for the Edinburgh Marathon at the end of May.
As it happened, Ryanair’s way showing that flights to Pisa were still available as part of its £5 deal was to offer return flights going out and back on the same day. Now technically such a journey might just about make it possible to enjoy seeing the leaning tower of Pisa from the window (I know that Pisa airport is very close to the city of Pisa, but I’m not sure if it is close enough for the leaning tower to be used as a control tower), but even diehard plane spotters wouldn’t fly out and then return immediately on the same plane (well, maybe some did for the A380, but come on, not for Ryanar!).
I don’t know how many flights Ryanair had to make available on each route in order for their adverts not to fall foul of regulations, but they said that they had 1 million seats available at the start of the promotion, and judging by how frequently these offers come about, I very much doubt that they sell all these seats anyway. If having availability on just one flight on just one day meant that they could satisfy any regulations, then it was certainly a bit cheeky to have outbound and return flights on the same day, but I would suspect that this was just a chance occurrence, especially as I was looking so close to the end of the promotion.
Even if all of the special offer seats might not go on all flights, I would expect that the quotas on some routes could fill up quite quickly. What was also very noticeable is that so-called cheap flights to Spain and Porto in Portugal weren’t included in this offer — they were only available from £27 one-way.
Looking at flights to or from Bologna, I could only find availability towards the end of April, which included outbound flights from Birmingham to Bologna on 20th of April at the £5 target price. I could then match this up with return flights from Pisa on either 25th 28th of April, both slightly below the target price at €5 — I guess these offers are made in Euroland using the same figures that are used in the UK, now that the pound and the euro are so close. I decided that our base myself and Florence for this trip, so hopefully five nights should be enough to enjoy the city itself and area around it.
Verdict
In order to make any profits, Ryanair rely on either bringing people into their website with the lure of a cheap offer, only to sell them more expensive flights, or they rely on their customers purchasing a whole load of extra services. The biggest ancillary revenue from Ryanair is car hire, but as be basing myself firmly in the city of Florence for this trip, I’ll get around using public transport. Sometimes, Ryanair can make money selling coach trips between the airport and the city centre, but there is a chance to do that at Pisa airport, which has its own station right to the terminal, and which is only 1 mile from the centre of Pisa. Bologna airport is also just a short bus ride away from the city centre, but as it is a very early morning flight, I’ll have to make sure I’m up early enough to get some decent breakfast, otherwise both Birmingham airport and Ryanair will benefit from my peckish-ness!.
Ryanair could also made up to £9 from being credit card processing fees, but as I paid by Electron debit card, I did not pay anything for that transaction.
Every short-haul flight departing from the UK is subject to £10 Air Passenger Duty per passenger (APD), which Ryanair will have to pay on my behalf. There will also be a local equivalent of APD to pay for flights leaving Italy, in addition to two sets of airport handling fees. So as long as I stick to my plans, Ryanair will make a loss on my booking of perhaps four times what I have paid.
What happened next?
And guess what follows the £5 sale? Going back to Ryanair.com this morning to do a bit more research, I see that they now have a £2 sale, ending at midnight tonight. Although the outbound leg of those £5 flights to Pisa on 7 April has gone up to £27.03, for the itinerary I’ve chosen, the outbound and return legs have both gone down to £2 and €2 respectively. So I’ve rushed to Ryanair’s website to make a booking for a flight I could have got cheaper if I had waited until the next day. And maybe they’ll be down to £1 tomorrow, and totally free by the end of the week. So have I got myself a good deal – yes, but just as you think you have beaten Ryanair’s system, they pull one back by offering another sale at an even lower rate.
