Ryanair say these things for the publicity. Quite often you'll see a Ryanair story about charging for toilets, or obese passengers... Keeps them on the front page.
<i>(Southwest manages to take a similar approach without coming off as hostile to customers). </i><p>[Disclaimer: Raving Southwest fan.]<p>AFAIC, Southwest is better than almost every other airline in almost every other category. Why? Because they have built a business the way I would want to build one, with one thing in mind: the customer.<p>Almost everything they do is what the customer wants because someone bothered to ask. Whenever I fly another airline, the differences are noticeable and I ask, "Don't these people get it?"<p>Ryanair sounds like they're doing the same thing in a mechanical way. Once they engage their customers as Southwest has, they'll have raving fans too.
Why is this hacker news? Anyways, it's annoying when they're reiterating the same line all the time...<p>"Ryanair promises four things: low fares, a good on-time record, few cancellations and few lost bags."<p>Fares aren't low. Easyjet beats them most of the time. Their prices are low only on the front page. It's only 30£ both ways... just add 50£ airport fees (I wonder why other airlines charge only <10£ for the same airport) each way, 20£ if you want to add even 1 piece of luggage, 10£ if you don't opt-out of fast boarding and we're going to ask you to select your nationality many times (only slightly indicating that by doing that you agree to buy insurance). Oh, and 10-15£ fee for handling any credit card at the end. And other things...<p>So you end up paying ~200£ for a flight that's advertised as 30£. They also wanted to be excluded some time ago from services that listed their real prices.<p>Oh and on-time flights... that's easy - just say that a 3h flight will take 3.5h - this way they're always 'on time' and passengers can wait some time at the airport (I'm used to arriving 30 min. early on my usual flight)