That is ... pretty rich.
A couple of years ago I was going to go see my brother in the UK who lived near Stansted. As such Ryanair would have been the most convenient airline. The shere number of dark patterns I encountered trying to book the ticket was such that when I got to the payment page and they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread in the exchange rate I rage quit. I should have known better even then, but now I will only use them if I have literally no other choice. With luck that means "never."
I'm always happy to see the various EU competition authorities pushing back on this kind of thing.
To make sure I had remembered that correctly I looked it up and here is a description of it:
https://www.insurancetimes.co.uk/ryanair-to-change-hidden-tr...
NB I've travelled with Ryanair quite a lot and actually don't mind the actual flights but it is wise to manage expectations about the kind of company you are actually dealing with.
Conference video showing this example from 2010: https://youtu.be/zaubGV2OG5U?si=8PkLWhxHFSGQWuWw&t=597
I used Ryanair a lot while studying abroad in Europe and the €20 flights were real if you jumped through the hoops, which was quite magical.
I once had a flight booked to Paris, but it landed in an airport 2 hours outside of Paris and the train/bus would’ve been 2x the flight cost, so being short of money I just didn’t take the trip and lost €20 :)
It's a mistake that I will only make once and never again!
I'm not surprised, but still a bit impressed by the ability to lie like this. Somehow I doubt even 9% of their passengers would know it was between Denmark and Finland.
Wild company, but they are entirely on brand.
To be fair, consumers have driven airlines this way. They’ve shown that they’ll buy based almost entirely on price and suffer any amount of agony in exchange.
I just don’t find basic economy or early flights or shitty airlines worth the bad stress.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/ryanair-ceo-talks-free-sex-o...
> He then asked the translator the German word for oral sex. After being told there wasn't one, he remarked "terrible sex life in Germany".
I’m finding this more and more. Uber does it, and even Walgreens does it when I’m in the US and tap my card it suggests that I pay in my home currency. This seems to be a new vector companies have found for ripping off their customers.
I can never remember which option should I pick. And to be really honest I don't remember if I tried to see if it matched my bank's rate or not
How quaint even the 90s seem today, and we though that was hyper capitalism!
How old a saying is caveat emptor?
Old enough to learn that it's a sociopathic stance that has no business in a well-functioning society.
You're arguing in favor of what's essentially a scam.
I had that with very small shops in non-touristy areas of Mexico where it was absolutely clear to not be a scam attempts by the shops owner. They had no idea what the terminal asked.
Their payment processor (the people they rent the machine off of) offers them this oppurtunity to 'unlock hidden revenue for merchants'[1][2][3] and they are happy to do this.
Visa in fact tried to ban it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_currency_conversion
Of course, there are regulations and agreements with various institutions that should be followed - but it's free money for the shop, nothing else.
[1] https://www.shift4.com/blog/dynamic-currency-conversion-unlo...
[2] https://www.fexco.com/payments-and-fx/currency-conversion-so...
[3] https://docs.adyen.com/point-of-sale/currency-conversion/
Makes sense that shop owners in non-touristy areas haven't seen them before, as you'll only see that when the card has a default currency that differs from the default currency of the terminal.
So if your Mexican merchants "don't know" what their terminal says? Either you were their first foreigner, or they're useful idiots, or they know.
For my part, I'd just always assumed the charge would be ultimately converted by my bank in any case. Seems obvious now I look back, but I honestly just didn't think about the trick.
Just as an example that gives evidence for this, sometimes you'll go to the same place multiple times and the norm is they ask but occasionally someone won't. So it's not a policy.
I presume the people who don't just don't know about it, don't want to bother me and aren't aware it will make a difference.
He could have merely been the first to do the math and bring it up. I could easily see most tourists overlooking this sort of thing, or not mentioning it because they're already accustomed to it.
The other thing I hate to see is people using the currency conversion desks at airports, or buying foreign currency from their banks in advance of trips. They give you awful rates.
Assuming you’re traveling to a civilized country, just stick your card in an ATM when you land and pull out the cash you need. Good banks don’t even charge their own ATM fee, so your total cost is the $3-4 that the ATM owner charges, and you get a pretty fair rate.
Also people buy currency locally - before the trip - where I am from, and all the rates are displayed, both in a bank or in currency exchange. You can compare. And even when someone is lazy they can just ask friends which place has the best rates, everybody seems to know which (and the answers are true and conistent, I checked). Buying locally at a currency exchange is the cheapest option.
If I've just arrived home with $30 left of whatever currency was used in the place I came from, they could be taking a 30% cut and it would still be worth it to just due it there rather than physically visiting a bank.
That is, if the currency is one they're even willing to exchange.
Charging significantly more to accept foreign currencies goes back thousands of years.
There is however one very good argument for. Currencies with very high volatility. Think extreme inflation. If you accept their conversion you know what you pay in your own currency. You have then mitigated a risk. If your own currency is volatile then you might gamble and win. If the foreign currency is volatile you will usually win by paying in the foreign currency. If both are volatile then it is a blind gamble.
The important part here are the settlement dates. Your bank usually do not calculate the exchange rate of the eaxct purchase time.
That is the excuse for the "service". But it is still not wanted and I consider it evil.
When traveling places with rampant inflation you will notice that sellers always negotiate 2 prices. One in the local currency and one in what is considered an easy to use hard currency such as USD or Euros. Forgeries and less cash flowing around has made it harder to use other less know but otherwise hard currencies.
So sellers never care what currency you choose to settle in as very close to zero sellers have multiple accounts on the same terminal. And those who really need it will always negotiate in different currencies.
You might have experienced something like this at times when visiting Argentina or Turkey.
So the "service" is only there for those who want to understand what they pay in their own currency or mitigate a settlement date. And will pay for it!
Local terminal holders rarely care. But the ATM mafias (such as EuroNet) do very much so. Because they actively are playing the mitigation game and are allowed to add fees.
I strongly feel this field should be very heavily regulated. But too much money is involved. And if you look at where VISA and MasterCard are located you will understand that is not a regulation happy corner of the planet.
If you’re in a place that wants dollars or euros because their currency is “bad” (volatile or unable to freely exchange for dollars), they prefer dollars. You can tell because you get a better than official exchange rate.
I have to say I’ve never been somewhere that the currency was so volatile the settlement date mattered. Carrying local currency would be part of your risk? This could only come up in the almost-all-digital-currency modern world.
Stuff like that is what I say "years ago" - I haven't used PayPal for a while now, and I won't use it again.
Of course foreign exchange offices have been doing this scam since forever ("no fees!")...
---
Edit - note that with a bureau d'exchange my objection is not that they charge for the exchange; clearly that is the exact business that they are in. It's the "no fees" etc. marketing that hides from the less astute punters exactly how (and how much) they are paying for the service. I'd like to see that outlawed and direct costs of the exchange up front (e.g. "Exchange £100 for $121.5 at a cost of £10 compared to the base rate")
Isn't that fairly easy to estimate? If they're showing you a buy rate and a sell rate, you know the interbank rate is going to be pretty much halfway between the two. I don't think anyone's changing money and thinking the bureau isn't profiting.
People use these desks because they think that’s just “what it costs.”
Advertised “No Fee” currency conversions, but a HUGE spread built into the conversion rate that comes out to a massive fee.
Although it is amusing to imagine an ATM that accosts you verbally with smalltalk when you use it.
But this is why Revolut and WISE cards are a god send when travelling, just load them up with the local currency and these issues disappear.
For example, just the other day I fat fingered the screen and chose the wrong currency.
Needed to get another member of staff to explain to her that the local currency option would work fine.
> I will only use them if I have literally no other choice
Even with the £20 increase they were likely cheaper than the alternative, if it exists. If this is going to push you into not using them, basically every other airline will be ruled out for you. EasyJet are exactly the same. BA/KLM/Air France/Aer Lingus are all the same on their short hop flights (I’ve actually never flown Lufthansa so I can’t comment on them). The short haul European routes are a race to the bottom.
When you compare list prices for flights with them versus almost any other airline you are comparing apples with oranges. The only way to figure out exactly what you'll pay is to go through the entirety of their checkout procedure. My experiences with those other airlines for short haul flights are quite different.
Honestly, on many routes, I think this is true far less often than it used to be.
The only place in I've had any troubles paying with card (or easily find a cashmachine) in recent time have been Turkey outside the big cities.
OTAs were blocked because they just run scam, and Ryanair customer supports had many problems with dealing with them.
Some example from Kiwi:
- if flight gets cancelled and refunded, OTA pockets the refund, does not give anything to custemer
- OTA does not provide customer with email used to make booking. Makes any changes like extra luggage or seat difficult
- If flight gets rescheduled, OTA may not inform customer
- Not possible to add extra child etc...
I would only use OTA like Kiwi when booking flight in very exotic country, and I have no idea how to checkin in chinese.
BoFA does this for international wires as well. And I suspect a lot of companies do this to their international customers too. Unfortunately, it’s become pretty standard
You forgot to mention picking the "No I don't need travel insurance" option shoved in the middle of the list of travel insurance prices, which defaults to you buying travel insurance from Ryanair.
Do you already have their spyware app installed and tracking you on your phone, to avoid being charged £50 for a plain boarding pass which you print yourself?
You're describing some other airline's website, surely. If you'd used Ryanair's site you would not be unaware of its fuckery.
And clicking "I don't need insurance" is easy.
They didn't choose to remove those fees - they were legally compelled to: https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-forbids-ryanair-from-char...
Dark patterns are still sketchy and unconscionable, regardless of how easy you find them to get past. They're put there by unscrupulous businesses to catch some people -- can you say no Ryanair customer has ever accidentally purchased Ryanair insurance they didn't need?
Similarly, their latest wheeze, that you skipped over, is to compel people to use their "app". The trading standards regulators need to smack Ryanair about the head with a cricket bat and again force them not to apply such bollocks.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/ryanair...
> Indeed, when I checked in for my 12 November flight to Germany a day ahead, I was told: “Make sure to print and bring your boarding passes to the airport or access them through the Ryanair app” and even “boarding passes must be printed for use”.
> But Ryanair says those are no longer acceptable. Oddly, though, you can use a paper boarding pass that is printed out at the airport by ground staff working for Ryanair – at no charge.
Such utter bollocks. They are totally capable of accepting paper boarding passes (or screenshots or PDFs of boarding passes shown on a phone -- better airlines let you download a PDF from their website once checked in, and you can put it on your phone or print it out; no proprietary app needed), they just want to compel you to install their app and get tracked and dinged and marketed at and upsold up the wazoo with zero benefit to you. It is not necessary at all, and I will continue to never travel with them.
If you take your time and read carefully. Because sometimes the colored choice is free, and sometimes it is the non-colored one. 100% dark pattern. As is disabling "paste" on check-in, forcing you to remember the 6-alphanumeric char booking code if you do not have a second device/pen&paper at hand.
(The number of upsells is such that it made a song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id-zzOGnN6A )
And I am also always confused about the non-transparency that people mention about their fees. When you do the checkout, you select the services you want and pay for those. There used to be a time when other airlines would have a lot of things included in the basic ticket price, but that's not the case anymore, so it's not different. And I think this was an inevitable in an industry with small profit margins where price differentiation would bring gains.
I was also Pro-Ryanair: they allowed to see friends and family across Europe with a student budget.
Now, it's an 8-step booking process where you try to figure out what is actually optional and avoidable and what's included in the advertised fare. Depending on the airport, they threaten to charge you if you don't print your boarding pass beforehand. Depending on the flight, they become pretty aggressive in weighing your carry on, mainly to try to catch you out and make an extra 50 euro.
The company went from no frills budget airline to antagonistic and aggro where literally anything is cranked up to 11 to extract value from you.
Given the mood in the thread, I do indeed think that I may have a high tolerance for such practices and pay careful attention to fine prints. After all, I had all the training while applying for numerous Schengen and other visas, immigration paperwork. After those, dealing with Ryanair that faces at least some competition and scrutiny is not that bad.
Multiple lifetimes of thousands of the most brilliant engineers collaborating, sharing algorithms, protocols, mining, smelting, developing tooling to create tiny rocks that can think and blasting them to hover over the earth just so we can slightly annoy the person next to us with a conversation about the weird stuff growing between our toes.
Not one time have I had a consistent internet connection whilst flying transatlantic on Delta, KLM or BA airplanes, to the point that I regretted having paid for it every single time.
EU621 comp was denied because the aircraft could not land due to wind.
I did spend about 12 hours in a fancy all inclusive on ryanair's dime (a bus arrived at the airport un-announced to the airport staff or us customers) while some slept in airbnbs and on the floor.
Btw, there are power banks and headphones which can easily handle 2 days.
As a pilot myself I know why all the holds exist and while not perfect, the majority of complaints aren’t random bullshit they are flight safety issues
The fact that people demand luxury because it went from veblen good to commodity is the problem
https://noyb.eu/en/want-book-ryanair-flight-prepare-face-sca...
The lack of transparency is that it's hard to price compare. Your will almost never pay the ticker price at Ryanair, but at others you might.
I do appreciate tho it's a bit of a trade off. These days many airline offer choice so if you don't need the extras you do save some money. But the tradeoff is if you do need those extras it's now more expensive and less transparently priced.
They're a total success commercially you can't deny it, but my god what a horrible experience for everyone involved, passengers and staff alike
You get what you pay for .
But yeah, you're not going to be flying Qantas or Emirates, you're going to be flying BA or Aer Lingus or Air France or even another LCC
Second, Ryanair et al have dragged all the previous decent airlines down with them into the gutter and even paying more doesn't really get you service of years gone by. The only way they could compete was by slashing costs and prices to appear near the same ranking in the search results. You don't really get what you pay for flying short haul in Europe. Even business is mostly "low cost economy plus" rather than true business class in Europe
Regarding the destinations, yes, Emirates does not fly from Memmingen to Stanstead. But why would anybody, unless they live in the village next to either.
Ryanair didn't drag anyone into the gutter. Buyers preferring to spend less did that, which could be for a variety of reasons, one of them being increased wealth gaps in society.
So again, if you don’t want to fly with ultra budget service, don’t.
Train, drive, bus.
I’d rather have a cheap flight and spend my money at my destination though.
Why isn't Ryanair allowed to prohibit use of their website by resellers?
To give a more general answer than the sibling comment, setting conditions on how a product may be used usually distorts the market, harms buyers, and reduces competition, naturally to the benefit of the one setting the conditions.
For example selling cars that you're not allowed to use for "professional" use, only personal (as Nvidia does with forbidding datacenter use of some of its GPUs, charging extra for it). There was also a self-driving company that forbade buyers from using their cars to create a taxi service, essentially reserving that market for themselves. It may have been Tesla, but I can't find the story right now. In general living in a world where we need manufacturer's permission to do anything is less than ideal.
In this case I'm sure Ryanair would like to spin it as resellers upcharging customers, but by complete coincidence, their practices also prevent someone knowledgeable in all their dark patterns from protecting customers from them by acting as an intermediary.
Like running the only gas station in town and then refusing to sell fuel to a competitor who is trying to build a gas station that wants to compete with you.
RyanAir would get all the negatives from an unhappy customer and restricted ways to fix it.
Any issues at all and it wouldn't take much to make a sale unprofitable.
Ryanair is cheap, they charge extra for everything. But the tradeoff is you get where you are going for cheap if you avoid all the extras, including bottled water.
I just now booked a ticket on gotogate, paid 80 euro and received a receipt from ITA airways for 120 euro. They apparently lost 40 euro on this sale, I only had to click "no" on about 18 questions.
In my case in 2020 I had to request my refund via PayPal for Vayama
Whenever I fly, I always take an empty water bottle through security and then fill it in the secure zone.
No you don't. You can:
> deselect all the up charges
This is nonsense. Third parties cannot provide extra luggage space, priority boarding etc.
I don't think thats correct, people who use travel agents do so because they like the service or are unable to book for themselves, it's not wrong to offer a service and be paid for it and there isn't any broad evidence that travel agents misrepresent anything.
Ryanair are idiots to not accept free sales.
The OTAs are idiots for wanting to sell Ryanair flights without gaining a commission.
And the biggest idiots are the Italian court who sticks their filthy fingers in this whole business.
Legitimately welcoming discussion here as I'm keen to hear the other side.
I see no way in which this is abusing a "dominant" market position. If you only want to sell tickets via your own site, what on earth could be wrong with that?
Ryanair wins ‘screenscraping’ case against Lastminute in France
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2022/05/25/ryanair-wins-...
The "verification" workflow is super obtrusive: either pay them to use facial recognition technology or do slower verification (which I assume would be too slow if you saw this last minute). If you missed the email, you'd end up having to pay 55 eur to fix the issue. I was able to complain to customer service but it was definitely incredibly user hostile, intrusive and just ridiculous given that I booked directly via their site.
> Dear AAA this booking, AABBCC, appears to have been made through a third-party travel agent who has no commercial relationship with Ryanair to sell our flights. Therefore, Ryanair has blocked this booking.
> As third-party travel agents often do not provide Ryanair with the correct passenger email address and payment details, we need to verify a passenger's identity before they can manage their booking and check-in online.
> Ryanair needs to carry out this verification process in order to ensure we can comply with safety and security requirements.
> Once a passenger on the bookings has completed Ryanair's verification process, we will provide full access to the booking, including to the ability to make changes to the booking, add additional services, and complete online check-in.
> Express Verification is available at a cost of EUR 0.59c per booking.
> This fee covers the cost of the verification. Ryanair does not benefit commercially from this. There is no charge for Standard Verification.
> Passengers who do not avail of online verification (Express Verification or Standard Verification) to verify their bookings can verify at the Ryanair ticket desk in the airport, however they will be charged an airport check-in fee of up to €/£55.
Being cheap is one thing, trying every trick in the book to try and make money the customer didn't mean to spend is another thing altogether as far as I'm concerned. That is worthy of hate.
Imagine if you had to agree and compromise on a single airline?
No thanks.
There can be a world where we don't let companies behave in the most abject ways possible.
> Imagine if you had to agree and compromise on a single airline?
This is literally a "the bar is in hell" take.
Sometimes they are the only option :-/
For flight hacks wiht Ryanair, try kiwi.com As far as I understand they also cover the financial risk should there be a problem with the connection.
You have to pay for the service, though, and if you’re already flying Ryan Air, cost is probably a factor.
The service used to be free, and while it was a bit frustrating to go through it, it did save me once. On the other hand I have a friend who, upon me telling my positive story with Kiwi support, told me her negative one. So your mileage may vary.
It’s still a good first site to check to get a general idea of what’s available where, though.
Depending on what you are looking for, Wiki Airport pages and this can be good: https://www.flightconnections.com/
But then we are talking about serious travelers and airports, where flights are scare.... ;-)
It turns out, they aren’t - there is a ton of fine print and if you happen to qualify they “refund” you in miles
Both in the US and Europe, it’d be great if the government used some of their overreaching powers they use to pass laws to spy on us to also pass laws to protect us as consumers for products and services across the board
It would be a decent consolation prize
Sort of off topic here but lack of consumer protection AND shitty airlines across the world are both subjects that really trigger me (not really)
I don't love the dark patterns, but believe the CEO when he says they are basically traps that enable the low prices for the people that don't fall for them.
I don't know what to respond to this. Are you saying you're fine with other people falling for the dark patterns if that allows for a cheaper ticket for you?
Didn't pre-print out your ticket? 100 euro fine. Your bag is too large at the gate? Same thing.
It's the airline of Compound Interest- "He who understands it, earns it... he who doesn't... pays it"
An airline that isn't purely catered to the rich, but to those who are intelligent, knowledgeable, and don't mind the lack of frills. It's like an airline crafted for grad students.
I wonder how that works out for them.
I also wonder if the time is ripe for some company to disrupt advertising by simply doing what google did on launch in 2000.
Amusingly my voluntary subscription was just under the cut-off amount and I cancelled it as soon as this came in. I bought a subscription to The Economist instead.
When I called to cancel and gave my reason as the paywall, they were very confused, but I knew what I was doing.
The way regulation works in the EU is typically EU comes up with regulation for countries to implement, then they implement the laws via their national system, then everything is handled "locally". So just leaving the EU doesn't mean that all of those things just stop being active, you need to go through the process of removing the local laws before.
> The social media giant was fined €200 million in April for breaching the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) over the binary choice it gives EU users to either pay to access ad-free versions of the platforms or agree to being tracked and profiled for Meta’s ads.
> In a press statement, the Commission said the revised offer would give users an “effective choice” between consenting to their personal data being used to show them fully personalised ads or handing over less personal data and seeing “more limited personalised advertising”.
Seems like there will be a more nuanced choice available in January, than "pay us or we'll track you"
UK gov is too busy enforcing the death of anonymity online anyway.
I know it happens in other countries, but can you actually get away with this in a civilized and non-authoritarian country today? Eventually you're gonna have to do/say something about it, if people keep opening up new cases about it.
> ... or no one bothers to enforce them any more?
Which is strange, because why wouldn't the UK enforce UK law? There is no such thing as "EU-wide laws" as I previously explained, so again I'm not sure why other EU citizens are being pulled into context here, it literally doesn't matter.
If no one is enforcing UK law, then obviously that's bad, but on another level. I'm not sure what point you're trying to do here. For example, if a company today breaks GDPR and I want to report them, then I'm gonna be engaging with my local agencies for that, regardless of where the company is based, assuming I'm in a EU country. There is no "EU bureau" you report to, since the company is breaking your local laws, you report them to your local authorities.
As far as I can tell by the context, you don't quite grok how EU regulations are actually implemented in reality, which is why you keep bring up other EU citizens, but it really doesn't matter. When GDPR came into effect, it's because the countries themselves have written and implemented local laws in their countries that align with GDPR, there isn't one "GDPR-law" that is enforced by an EU entity across the entire union.
> An EU citizen may have grounds to complain if it's illegal in their jurisdiction, but to who?
If I'm in Italy, and a German company is breaking some Italian law, then I'm reporting them to the Italian authorities.
EU citizens would have reason to be concerned about this. It’s not clear how an EU citizen would deal with this nor is it clear this would even be prohibited since there have been some recent rulings that muddy this. Nor is it even clear there would be a UK response since certain kinds of analytics are fine under UK GDPR.
You’ve taken something very interesting and open to interpretation and reduced it down to circular arguments. That’s boring.
> > > Hmm the guardian has gone "accept tracking or subscribe".
> > I didn’t know you were allowed to do that with cookies.
> UK site. Not in the EU any more.
This is the initial context for me in this conversation. As I understand things, whether UK is in the EU or not, they can still have laws active in the country that were introduced while the UK was in the EU.
Then someone said:
> ... or no one bothers to enforce them any more?
Which I guess is where I lose track a bit of what the actual subject is. We're talking about UK laws, that they may or may not still have as active in the UK, but at that point I already suspect that they're talking about some "EU-wide laws" or similar instead, which for me muddy the waters.
> Who's going to open a case and where?
Then this appears, which has obvious answers; if you're a UK citizen and someone broke UK law, you report to UK authorities. If you're from $EU_COUNTRY, then you report it in $EU_COUNTRY.
If you're in $EU_COUNTRY and UK company breaks your national laws, same applies as for any non-EU country, you report it in $EU_COUNTRY.
Going back to the initial question, can The Guardian ask "let us track you, or pay to visit this website"? For entities covered by the DMA, the answer is clear: No (so Meta cannot do this, which is why they're changing it). Otherwise, the answer isn't so clear, yet.
Now I don't know what I'm being dismissive about, I feel like I did my best following how the subject seemingly changed across comments, but I can acknowledge I lost track of the initial questions, for that I apologize. I guess I loose track of the discussion as the questions seems to get less specific, rather than more specific.
You have the choice of not viewing the website.
But the EU posted a press release last year that they are investigating this, as it could breach the DMA. [1]
The Guardian doesn't fall under the DMA though.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
"Ryanair’s tactics included rolling out facial recognition procedures for people who bought tickets via a third party, claiming that was necessary for security. It then “totally or intermittently blocked booking attempts by travel agencies”, including by blocking payment methods and mass-deleting accounts. The airline then “imposed partnership agreements” on agencies which banned sales of Ryanair flights in combinations with other carriers, and blocked bookings to force them to sign up. Only in April this year did it allow agencies’ websites to link up with its own services, allowing effective competition. The competition authority said Ryanair’s actions had “blocked, hindered or made such purchases more difficult and/or economically or technically burdensome when combined with flights operated by other carriers and/or other tourism and insurance services”.