I'm in the exact situation as alamedadan. Have all of my ORD-DUB-ORD seats booked for a family of five, and we're headed for south France not too far out of Nice. July/August 2013. Might fly back out of Paris, so it could be two one-ways. On the ORD-DUB piece, we might stop over in Ireland for a couple days.

I've signed up for both the Ryanair and Aer Lingus email lists. Another thread indicated that they actually announce decent deals through the emails (unlike U.S. airlines, which stopped doing anything interesting with email about 10 years ago).

I've always heard about these Ryanair deals where you pay 1 euro (or something very low) for the seat and then fees out the wazoo. Aer Lingus looks more traditional in its pricing. I assume we'd be checking one bag each. Ordinarily we could maybe go 3 total bags checked across 5 people but the 15kg limit on Ryanair probably rules out a couple of our largest bags.

Anyway, I'm interested in (a) when the Ryanair schedule is released, (b) whether either one has a known habit of editing the schedule after it has been published, and (c) whether there's any known pattern to when either of these airlines do their fare sales.

General preference would be to stay on EI of course. But if paying with a debit card and accepting bad coach seats and no soft drinks or water for a short flight saves us a lot of money, I'd be okay with it.

Overall thrilled to be able to get so many award seats together to Europe for peak summer travel for 40k Avios a pop and almost no YQ. ^