There was also a big thread at the time (2018): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18526261. Since the cutoff is about a year, that repost was ok, but the current one was not ok.
I don't love Ryanair but the people who criticise them remind me of the Woody Allen joke about the diners complaining about the restaurant, "The food was terrible and the portions! So small!"
>Ryanair is a wonderful example of two extremes - it’s one of the worst possible airlines that nickel and dimes you for everything, it’s not a great employer, and it is rated the worst European airline; however, it’s dirt cheap.
This is an interesting conclusion. I would say that being cheap and terrible are not two extremes, but the same one.
They stranded me in London for 3 days after a thunderstrike took out some service vehicle. I spent 8 hours standing in a line. After 3 days the replacement flight was cancelled too.
I ended up having to take a bus from London to Berlin. Naturally they refused to pay for any of that and the emergency hotel.
This and the comment you're replying to capture the Ryanair experience really well: if everything goes exactly to plan, well ... it's fine. However if anything goes awry, god help you. Pretty much everyone I know has encountered an issue with Ryanair - the ol' sneaky extras they slip into your booking, cancelled flights, overbooked flights, checked luggage that gets bumped to the next flight, and so on.
My most recent pain came about due to the coronavirus stuff, my flights were cancelled which I expected and is understandable, and they offered me two options: a refund or a flight voucher. Their site would simply not process the refund at all however, everything was lightning fast and refund button immediately returned an error saying there was heavy traffic and they couldn't service my request. Well fair enough, I thought, there's likely a few people like me. I tried this for nearly 2 weeks (sometimes at 2-4am) before I finally somehow managed to get the manual refund form to submit without error. Then a week later they sent me emails saying I needed to hurry up and either claim my refund or take the flight voucher.
I find out later that they just completely shut off the refund processing altogether because their staff simply weren't around. This was all a charade to scare you into not trying to claim your refund.
If they were up-front about it, fine - everyone's a bit more forgiving due to the Coronavirus crisis, it has wrong-footed many of us. But faking service outages over to spook people into not getting their money is just so typically Michael O'Leary and so ... Ryanair.
Not always. I’ve spent 36 hours stuck at a gate with no plane in sight with them, before they finally cancelled the flight - mechanical issues with the aircraft, apparently - and they always find a way to worm out of the EC compensation directive, mostly by just flatly refusing to engage. Still waiting for the refund, nearly a year on - they give themselves 250 working days to issue refunds.
They also have poorly trained pilots, who either aren’t qualified for ILS or aren’t confident in poor conditions - on numerous occasions I’ve been on flights which they’ve diverted (Bristol becomes Birmingham, Bergerac becomes Toulouse, Porto becomes Madrid) because of weather, while other airlines land and take off without issue.
> They also have poorly trained pilots, who either aren’t qualified for ILS or aren’t confident in poor conditions - on numerous occasions I’ve been on flights which they’ve diverted (Bristol becomes Birmingham, Bergerac becomes Toulouse, Porto becomes Madrid) because of weather, while other airlines land and take off without issue.
This is straight-up defamatory. Ryanair have similar entry requirements to the majors, much better training and equipment, and the best safety record of any airline in the world. No one gets an EASA Part FCL without ILS, and every Ryanair pilot will be absolutely confident in ILS approaches - most will have done far more than other airline pilots.
So why can’t they land or take off in fog or rain, when other airlines can? I’m guessing you work for them, so I’d love an explanation.
Cheap insurance policies that don’t cover it?
I’ve also experienced more atrocious landings with Ryanair than any other airline - flaring late, early, or not at all - they must spend a fortune repairing undercarriage.
I don’t buy it. Bargain basement airline, bargain basement pilots.
I mean, if they were any good, they’d fly for one of the majors, rather than a notoriously mean employer, no?
I have no reason to doubt that their pilots are trained as well as other pilots. However, I also have no reason to believe they are trained any better.
Do you have any reference to the claim of "much better training" and "far more [ILS approaches] than other airline pilots"?
Ryanair is simply a young airline that only recently grew in size. Their safety record is practically blank and hardly qualifies them as the best in the business.
Hawaii Airlines for example has not had a single fatal crash since it’s founding in 1929.
Ryanair is 34 years old and flew more PAX in the last two years than Hawaiian has in its entire history, with significantly fewer accidents and incidents, even if you only consider those that occurred while both airlines were flying. It's hard to find historical PAX numbers for Hawaiian, but it seems that Ryanair overtook them at some point in 2000.
I don't see any basis for your claim that their safety record is "practically blank". They are widely considered the world's safest airline - a spot they shared with Southwest until SWA1380.
If you compare crashes per flight by year, the entire industry has become safer over time. The expected number of crashes given their operating history assuming an average airline would likely be zero. In fact over 20 major airlines currently having a clean record. So, on it’s own that’s really not enough information to say anything.
If we are trying to find ‘the best’ airline in the industry you need to either consider only current practices/equipment etc, or look for airlines with zero crashes despite higher expected lifetime risks.
> they always find a way to worm out of the EC compensation directive
That's not been my experience. I had a cancelled return flight, received an SMS about 6 hours before the scheduled departure. I was able to exchange online my flight for another one going to Budapest (I just wanted to be anywhere in the EU at least) where I stayed for the night and took another plane home.
Once home, I submitted all this to their customer service and I was totally reimbursed, even though the cancellation was due to a strike in Brussels and not their fault. I was honestly surprised not to have to fight.
>They also have poorly trained pilots, who either aren’t qualified for ILS or aren’t confident in poor conditions - on numerous occasions I’ve been on flights which they’ve diverted (Bristol becomes Birmingham, Bergerac becomes Toulouse, Porto becomes Madrid) because of weather, while other airlines land and take off without issue.
Completely wrong they have the same requirements as any other airline. It's the law to have a APL and a type rating + check rides every 6 months -- just like any European airline.
I dont believe it is pilot training, but rather Ryanair doesnt always install proper lighting for heavy fog nor do the smaller european airports on the runways themselves. The lack of more advanced lighting on the planes is probably fine for major european airports that have ground lighting rated to a category of visibility, but the smaller airports have a lesser lighting and fewer backups so combined with Ryanair planes the pilots don’t/can’t risk landing. I had this experience in Poland, where a ryanair flight was expected to land in Bydgoszcz but landed in Gdansk instead (without informing anyone in English of what or where we were)
As a customer, I have no problem with them. Given that they only do short flights anyway, the lack of comfort is not an issue. It would be different if I had to spend 10 hours on their plane, but I don't. Pretty much the same experience as any other low-cost airline (easyJet, Wizz Air, eurowings, etc.)
Yes but if you have half a brain you can travel real cheap. Who needs a big bag, or to be fed on 2 hour flight? People want cheap tickets plus all the frills and that's not the deal they signed up for with Ryanair
At least you have a cheap option. On US domestic airlines you pay $300 round trip NYC to Chicago and still have to pay for carry-on baggage. Although you do still get a free soda and bag of pretzels.
Wrong. JFK-ORD July 2, 9am-10:49am direct; July 5 12pm-3:21pm direct on JetBlue with 1 free carryon, is only $89 roundtrip. Flight is B6 1105 and B6 906.
Ryanair is a bit beyond the pale...worse than Spirit here in the US. They've planned in the past, for example, to charge a fee for using the toilet. And a different plan to remove them in favor of more seats. Neither panned out, but still.
Not really, the CEO just says crazy things to drum up some publicity. He also claimed he would charge fat people more, and that Ryanair was so frugal that they didn't let employees charge their phone at work to save electricity.
I am convinced that the talk about charging for using the toilet is just a diversion. You have passengers complaining about charging extra for everything but they end with “Well, at least I don’t have to pay for going to the toilet.” I think it is just clever marketing.
I disagree. In my opinion, he was simply testing the waters to see if there would be a lot of pushback. This is kinda how microtransactions eventually became standard. Gamers are not very patient customers and any talk of voting with wallet rarely gains traction.
It is going to sound very cynical, but something being illegal is not always something that would stop a company from doing things. Laws being enforced could and even then it depends on whether it is enforced gently.
There are some laws that companies will sometimes try to publicly flaunt. In general, laws around aviation safety aren't on the list; very expensive when all your planes get grounded.
This is part of the brand building. Ryanair want you to associate their name with cheap and those headlines are deliberately encouraged by their CEO who will use every trick in the book if he gets PR out of it. On a side note, I don't think Ryanair are terrible. They're punctual and have seats that cannot recline, which to me is a positive flight experience.
Except there have been other low-cost airlines that are now, sadly, defunct who had a decent service (still no frills, but less of the nickel and diming) and were low cost - Monarch and FlyBE.
Monarch especially was great as they had a direct flight from my old local airport to Gibraltar.
Southwest wants you to believe they're inexpensive. But they don't allow themselves to be easily compared.
You can't see their fares except on their webpage, not on a travel search. They include bags and others don't which can be nice, but makes comparison difficult. Etc.
There was a discussion here the other day about the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, which is today known as a Eulerian path. [1]
Unlike Eulerian paths, which are detectable in linear time [2], detecting Hamiltonian paths is NP-complete [3]. Does anyone have an intuitive explanation for why this is the case?
> Does anyone have an intuitive explanation for why this is the case?
Imagine building a Eulerian path. You're standing at a node, trying to figure out which edge to go down next. Eventually, because it's a Eulerian path, you'll have to go down all the edges eventually. This means it doesn't matter which edge you go down--even if your path hits a dead end, you can magically go back in time and patch in a cycle to your original path.
Put another way, if you establish that a graph has a Eulerian path, every maximal set of edge-disjoint cycles in the graph constitutes that path. Just by looking and making decisions at a very localized context (every node), you can formulate a correct answer.
By contrast, Hamiltonian paths are rarer. Only some maximal sets of node-disjoint cycles can be combined to construct a Hamiltonian path. You don't have the property that you can trivially patch the cycles together if you make a mistake. Looking at a node and trying to decide which next node to pick, you'd have to understand the structure of the entire graph very well to understand if traversing to A will screw you up, and the ramifications are not local.
Ryanair can only possibly be the worst rated European airline because everyone uses it. There are plenty of budget airlines between obscure routes in Europe that are the same caliber.
Thanks to Ryanair a flight that started at 140 pounds in 1986 can be had for less that 20 today.i know someone who had to pay 400 for it when they needed to get to a funeral.
£140 would have probably included things like baggage, more leg room, perhaps less restrictive ticket terms and food on a full service airline with eg better IRROPS handling.
Believe it or not it's a half hour flight, (the alternative is a ferry and drive/bus). It was a scandal what inefficient national carriers were able to get away with in those days. Most people had to do the long bus trip, 15 hours because flying was too expensive.
I had a technical assignment with an online air tickets seller, and the requirement was to build the backend for a service that will find routes between airports. aboy was it a fun assignment. As the nodes increase, the time to search the graph for routes increases exponentially. non stop routes would yield the result in milliseconds, 1 stop about 1 second, 2 stops around 40 seconds, 3 stops about 4 minutes, 4 stops.. well I didn't wait for that :) I had engineered a dataset of flights and airports from a puclic source, for a couple thousands airports, and a couple tens of thousands of flights. graph theory is very interesting subject.
Turns out, my solution was overkill, and I got the job, but 2 months later Corona happened, so now I'm back to freelancing :D
My experience with Ryanair ist pretty good. If (big if) you know what to expect. I had terrible experiences with Wizz and United and avoid them like the plague.
Ryanair is cheap. Tickets can be 9.99, 12.99 Euros. (One Way). I have often speculatively bought these tickets for a trip that might or might not occur and then let them expire. Obviously this is part of their business strategy.
But Ryanair is great.
By the way, Kiwi.com also searches flights with Ryanair connecting flights (AKA Flight hacks). They once offered me a 50 Euros trip from Duesseldorf to Malta with 5 tickets, including going to Bucharest, Berlin etc. I would have been on the road/in the air for two days.
Ryanair is like McDonald's of air travel. I have taken well over 50 flights with them over the last decade, and never had a bad experience, because I always knew what to expect.
In general, it's not worth paying more than 50-60 EUR for a one-way ticket, and it's not worth expecting any compensations or support if something goes wrong.
Nobody expects a restaurant experience from a fast-food chain.
In theory, yes. In practice, it would often cost more in time to actually obtain anything from a low-cost airline in Europe than the compensation was worth.
I strongly believe that if one wants the level of customer service of a traditional airline, (s)he should be flying with a traditional airline, – and paying for it.
Ryanair is like Gmail, the more the price of something tends to zero, the more you're ready to put up with bullshit like (Google reading your mail, or obnoxious ads on your inbox, etc)
I always really enjoy reading graph algorithm pieces, and similarly after studying them have never actually used them. A really nice approach to a fun problem.
There was also a big thread at the time (2018): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18526261. Since the cutoff is about a year, that repost was ok, but the current one was not ok.