The Captain's Blog ™

In what may prove to be a warning shot across Ryanair’s bows, the chief executive of the UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has likened the airline’s practice of levying charges for all but an obscure card-based payment method as ‘quite puerile’ and ‘almost childish’.

Mr Fingleton’s comments, reported in an interview with The Independent newspaper, refer to Ryanair’s current practice of charging £5 extra per person per leg for bookings that are paid for with the vast majority of payment cards.  The only fee-free payment card option is a little held prepay product from MasterCard, accurately described by Mr Fingleton as ’some low frequency payment mechanism’.

Mr Fingleton further suggests in the interview that Ryanair considers itself to be playing a ‘funny game” that is ‘almost like taunting consumers and pointing out: “‘Oh well, we know this is completely outside the spirit of the law, but we think it’s within the narrow letter of the law’.”

The Independent’s research suggests that the actual cost to Ryanair of processing payments by debit or card is only around 30p per transaction, a figure that contracts starkly with the airline’s actual charges of £5 per passenger, per leg of journey - amounting, for example, to £40 for a booking covering a family of four taking a return flight.

Ryanair has reportedly reacted angrily to the OFT boss’s statements. The airline’s head of communications is quoted as saying ‘Ryanair is not for the overpaid John Fingletons of this world, but for the everyday Joe Bloggs who opt for guaranteed lowest fares because we give them the opportunity to fly across 26 European countries for free, £5 and £10. What the OFT must realise is that passengers prefer Ryanair’s model as it allows them to avoid costs such as baggage charges which are still included in the high fares of high cost, fuel surcharging, strike-threatened airlines such as BA.’

I can only assume that Ryanair is hoping to capitalise on the theory that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. In this case, any such hope is surely misplaced.

Firstly, how can Ryanair suggest with any credibility at all that a (£5 per passenger, per leg) charge for taking payment by any mainstream payment card should be the same as the cost of a European flight (by the communication head’s own definition)? Would you accept the same argument when buying, say, a £10 takeway? ‘That will be £10 for the food and £5 per person for paying by card’. I think not!

And all this is before even raising the (again reportedly contentious) subject of Ryanair’s checked baggage rules. The low cost airline currently imposes a surcharge on any item of checked baggage that weighs over 15kg. When the weight of a suitcase alone can easily exceed 6kg, this hardly strikes me as being a generous allowance. Both British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, for instance, allow one bag weighing up to 23kg for economy class passengers.

In this particular case, I really don’t think that a ‘lovable rebel’ argument from Ryanair is going to wash. Perhaps a ‘hands up, we’ll fix it’ approach would have been the better strategy, much as that may have felt like a bitter pill to swallow?

Related links: Wegolo – price comparison for low cost airlines | British Airways | Virgin Atlantic