Getting in on the BOS-DUB Aer Lingus Avios 25K RT next summer. Since there is no EI intraEurope award availability, looks like we'll have to rely on Ryanair to get us to France. Looking at their route map, we would fly from DUB to either Carcassone or Rodez, spend a week there, drive up to Paris for a short stay, then on to Dublin and home. Ryanair doesn't fly to those southern France airports every day, so we are very interested in finding out when they will reveal their summer 2013 timetable and open it up for booking. Thanks!

Normally 6 months before 1st April- last year the flights were up mid November. But FR are always scrapping with some destination airports and the schedules can be delayed until the airport pays up or FR pull out!
Might be worth looking at the chat on the Ryanair forum on Pprune.
http://www.pprune.org/airlines-airpo...anair-9-a.html

Don�t immediately rule out Aer Lingus/EI � in many cases they will be the same price (if not cheaper) than Ryanair if they fly to an area you want to be in, and I�m pretty sure EI�s baggage charges (both charge for bags) will be lower.

It may also be worth checking out Cityjet (AF partner) to get to France � they have a few random destinations, although not sure how far south they will get you. You may also be able to use Skyteam miles for their flights if you happen to have any knocking about.

It should be out Nov/Dec. Bare in mind that FR only finalise there schedules 4 weeks before the summer season startes so it won't be set in stone until the week begining 4 March 2013. As said above EI can work out much cheeper than FR most of the time.

Rodz will most lighlty operate for 2013 on Sun/Wed or Tue/Sat.
Carcassone will most lightly operate for 2013 on Sun,Mon,Wed,Fri,Sat (some days will only be peak summer).

If the above is the general area you want to get to then you also have:
Air France/Cityjet operate to Pau once weekly dep DUB on Friday and return on Mon.

Aer Lingus operate to Toulouse 4 times weekly and they also fly 3 times weekly to Perpinan. I would reccomond them as FR double baggage charges in summer 15kg will cost you 30 euro. EI will offer 15kg for 15 euro.

Shorthaul baggage fee on EI is waived if you're connecting from or to a TATL flight, within 14 days. Although this may need to be on a single itinerary. The first bag fee is also waived if you book through a third-party.

EI's baggage allowance is 20kg, not 15kg.

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. ^

Notes: Ryanair allows you to choose a first checked bag allowance of 15kg or 20kg. On DUB-NCE it would be �25 for 15kg and �35 for 20kg, one-way, paid online. Starts at �100 if paid at the airport By comparison, Aer Lingus is �15 for 20kg, so make sure you factor it in.

Ryanair requires you pay with the Ryanair Cash Passport and Aer Lingus with a Visa Electron card to avoid the fee of �6 per pax each way.

Ryanair generally puts its fares almost entirely in the "fare" section rather than "taxes", as you can't advertise fares excluding taxes any more, and taxes are supposed to be refundable if you cancel.

Ryanair requires you to check in online and present your boarding pass printed on A4 paper (not letter) to avoid a fee of �60 per pax per flight.

Ryanair releases its schedule whenever it feels like it. I believe its current booking horizon is May 2013. Aer Lingus tends to be more traditional and releases its core routes at T-355 and other routes usually at the start of the preceding season (winter/summer). Each will axe non-performing routes outside of the schedule times if warranted.

Ryanair does not do sales anywhere near as much as it used to. Aer Lingus is running one at the moment.

Does Aer Lingus have kiosks to print boarding passes at the airport? If we're traveling in Ireland for a day or two, likely at B&B's that might not have computers and printers, we'd likely want to check-in online at T-24 but not physically print the BP.

Is a Visa Electron card basically just a Visa card...or something else?

Basically it's starting to sound like Ryanair is a pretty mean-spirited airline to fly. Make one mistake and you either have to pay 200-300% of your ticket price in fees or you're stuck not flying. I don't mind paying reasonable fees (begrudging accepting a baggage fee as "reasonable") but I'd worry a lot about "gotchas" that I didn't expect once I got to the airport.

Thats them really. They dont like luggage at all. The seats are the smallest in the UK market as well.

Here is a pic of the boss of Ryanair

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage...on-planes.html

Yes at certain airports, including all Irish ones. Note that EI online checkin for flights within Europe opens at T-30, not T-24. The best seats will be gone by T-24.

Note that there is no fee on EI to get your boarding card at the airport, either from a kiosk or from an agent.
It is a different type of card that is not widely issued. The origin of the rule was that for a time, airlines had to advertise their fares including all non-optional fees, and the fee was considered optional if you could somehow avoid it, such as by paying with Visa Electron. The rule now (for airlines operating in the UK at least) is that a debit card fee must be included in the advertised price, so the Visa Electron distinction is legally moot, but some of the airlines offering lower fees for Visa Electron still do so.
That's Ryanair for you. If you follow all its rules to the letter, you'll get cheap transport, but you'd better not be bringing a 23lb carryon, or a separate personal item, and so on.