There are two separate issues here - one is Buzz, one is KLM's discontination of the STN-AMS route in (IIRC) 2002..

Buzz, like BA's Go, was an attempt to compete with the low-cost sector. Buzz was a good airline, but it didn't succeed.

The reason KLM pulled out of STN is that by 2002 STN had very much found its niche as London's LCC airport. It wasn't just KLM that pulled out, other legacy carriers (like LH and SAS) all pulled out of STN at around the same time.

Agree with most of ur points other than the timing part.. since IME theyare as punctual as it gets..and for the price we pay, its sufficient for me that they get me from A -->B more or less in time..if booked in advance, then its even cheaper than buses in many many cases..

+1 but only if paid by personally

I'll be stoned by others for doing it, but please dont call Ryanair Ryan Air.
Its like calling United Uni Ted. (Ted is dead btw)
Or don't use two letter code RA. RA is a two letter code for Royal Nepal Airlines. Two letter code for Ryanair is FR.

no stoning from my side....i wouldn't want to confuse ryanair with any other airline....

You dont care if you will be late
Actually, they have a very good on-time record. Partly because they use uncongested airports, and partly because they incentivise (as in incentivise with extreme prejudice) their staff.

You wont have any luggage with you
I'll give you this one, although 10kg carry-on is plenty for many people.

You are ok with to land in airport very far from the city center
Depends on where you're going. Some (eg: HHN, GRO) are indeed miles from the city they purport to serve (although nobody's forcing you to go to Frankfurt...). Others (SXF, DUB) are the same airport that everybody else serves. And yet more (PIK, CIA) are arguably closer and/ or more convenient than the 'main' airport.

You dont expect any service at all and I mean any service
On all my FR flights, I have had polite and friendly checkin agents and cabin crew.

That's all I ask. Even better, the seats don't recline on FR

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It's horses for courses. If you're young, free and single and you can travel off-peak to a destination you didn't know you wanted to go to, and you pack light, and you read the rules, and can jump through the hoops then you really can travel for next to nothing.

If you're a family of 6, travelling with 35kg of luggage each, absolutely have to be in Barcelona for a wedding, might change your mind about the return flight, don't have access to a printer, etc then perhaps it's not for you.

PIK closer? I'll just about give you "convenient" if travelling by train - and not arriving in Glasgow at Queen Street - but then using that argument CIA wouldn't be more convenient.

Well I did say and/ or

According to Google, CIA is 15.5 km driving distance from Rome, FCO is 40.3km.

And I really do find PIK more convenient than GLA. I'd rather have a good, solid train taking me directly in a single seat to the airport than faff around with shuttle buses and traffic - even if it does take longer.

It depends on your final destination, of course. Very few pax really want to end up slap bang in centre of town. My point was really that the secondary airports aren't always the sordid outposts the naysayers would have you believe, and sometimes they are equally or more convenient.

Other times, they really are in the @rse end of nowhere

+1.. basically keep ur hopes intact and remember what the next best flight was costing u before cribbing.. u get what u pay for which IMO is much better than some full service airlines like LH where u pay thru ur nose and get less than what you can get for a lesser price on other comparable airlines..

As I am a bit short of ��s this year, I flew quite a bit with FR, most recently 4 flights in last week, another 4 couple of weeks earlier.

Out of 8, one flight was late about 20 mins and one about 15 - the rest were early or on time. Out of 8, I was sitting in row 1 [and had more legroom than on any 'legacy' carrier in Y] 7 times, without paying for priority boarding.

In most of the cases they were flying to the only airport of the city I was going to - OPO, FAO, KAU, TMP etc - so didn't have any more problems with getting to/from the airport than anybody else.

I travel light [and know how to pack] and I am not bothered about missing a sandwich on 1-2-3 hrs flight. I do bring a bottle of water/snack with me on board.

The main reason for me to fly with them was that total cost for those eight flights was ~�50, all taxes included.

I was booked Ryan air Jerez-Madrid and return Sep 29** and Oct 11. On the 29th there was a transportation strike in Spain and my flight was cancelled. Ryan Air advised me in advance that the flight might be cancelled and asked me to keep in touch. I was travelling without a European cellphone and had problems contacting Ryan---they do not make it easy to communicate with them. I finally got the ITT Travel agent at Rota Spain to find a phone number and Ryan gave me a seat on the next flight, 30 Sept at around 10PM.

In this case I think they did as best they could so good on them. Almost every European I spoke with put Ryan air down soundly BUT their planes are flying with near capacity so they are doing something right.

Just make sure you check CAREFULLY the restrictions and extra charges.

Same here.. I feel they try their best to accomodate in case of cancellations due to strike..i faced it when my familes flight got cancelled due to the paris strike last month..i feel they are worth the money they charge(thats not much)..

welcome to ft b0566....good to see ryanair did the right thing....you don't hear that a lot....

Sez you. Other posters have made comments which do not tally with yours.

IME Ryanair never do anything outside their own T+Cs and the law. They did try it on during the volcanic ash fiasco, possibly through ignorance - they were not alone - but soon complied.

As you know from your own posts in the Hilton HHonors forum, you agree that T+Cs are very important. So long as people abide by them, there will be no problem. @:-)

i am talking from my personal experience & the experiences of a lot of other people i know....as is the case with most things in this world, some people will agree & some won't....

i very much feel that the t&c of the program are important....in the hilton forum i simply stated that if the t&c of the program state that they can delete your account after 12 months of no activity then they are completely within their rights to do so....

but i also feel that a lot of times hotels & airlines try to bend the t&c for their own advantage....you do realise that programs can work around the t&c & screw you over....a classic example is spg not giving suites to plats by giving some excuse to cover the t&c of the program....

There's a huge amount of snobbery about low cost airlines which is, for the most part, unwarranted.

I've only had good experiences with Ryanair, never paid more than �5 for the flight (INCLUDING taxes with no charge for online check-in), the carry-on allowance is more than enough for me for most two night breaks (otherwise I'd use a different airline) and I've some places that I would never have got to see otherwise. Day trips to Norway, the Netherlands, South West Ireland etc.

I have always had great seats, and just wait to board last so just chill out at the airport.

Yes, O' Leary is a mouth, but the article in the OP makes a very good point that he is just saying what other airlines are thinking. And it was actually, in the UK, British Airways who started unbundling, not Ryanair. Ryanair simply took it to its logical conclusion. It was FlyBE who started charging for checked luggage. Ryanair just get the flack.

Remember when you couldn't get cheap single tickets on airlines? For a cheap fare you had to have a Saturday night stay? That seems so old fashioned and blinkered now.

Now, I am not totally blinded with low fares.

I hate that LCC's have more or less made through check-in impossible, thereby removing the benefit of connecting flights and removing their responsibility for delays at the same time.

I hate that LCC's are so clearly in it for the ��� like the legacy airlines they claim to scorn, just look at Ryanair fares on routes where there is no competition.

So, Ryanair. A lot of noise, some good stuff, some not so good.
Like most airlines then.