Following on from last week’s fuss about toilets, lunatic bloggers and observations about them taking adverts for rival airlines, I should add that this week Ryanair have been offering sales where they seem to pick a random number out of a hat (between 2 and 5), and offer flights at that price, including ‘all taxes and charges.’ Is someone in Ryanair towers just rolling a dice to pick the flight price?

They say that 1 million seats are available each time, but if they sold 1 million each day, that would be 365 million per year – about 6 times the actual number of passengers they carry at all price points. Yet I have done a fair bit of checking, and as I said on Monday, there are seats available at these prices – even if you will sometimes have to be extremely flexible in your itinerary to take advantage. I made a booking myself on Sunday night, and opted to take flights out to Bologna, and back from Pisa – but that’s the way I normally book flights anyway, so I’m still happy.

My suspicions are that the majority of people will find one flight at the bargain price, and maybe see another at “0.00 GBP + taxes”, and leave it at that. Or worse, they will take a bargain flight out, and pay upwards of £50 for the return leg, as that’s the best fit they can find for their schedule.

The bottom line is to remember that Ryanair aren’t in the business of selling cheap flights to suit everyone’s diary, and as long as only a small percentage of customers take them up on their very lowest offers (I’d love to know how many, but I doubt they’d tell anyone that), they will still be in a position to make money of all the extras – some hidden, some voluntary, but they all add up unless you make a determined effort not to pay for any of them.