As a student I was able to travel all round Europe with Ryanair. For the cheapest tickets you need to watch flight times and check you can get public transport to the airport at the ungodly hours, and the airport location.

These days I don't fly with Ryanair. Its's just too much hassle, for tiny savings, compared with other LCCs who depart from normal airport terminals at acceptable times.

I don't agree with flights always being faster than trains - not taking into account the whole journey time. Trains have power sockets and you can work non-stop, make calls, the time is far more useful. And if you're plans change, you can just turn up and get on a train... sleeper trains are also great for morning meetings at the other end of the UK.

Ditto to all of it. And 0500 means 0455 to me too ! :)

It will be a cold day in hell if I ever fly Ryanair.

What if you're flying one of those routes which is * only * done by Ryanair?
It's all very well for folks served by major hubs to sniff at the likes of Ryanair, but they opened a lot possibilities to those near minor airports.

The problem is they call airports "London Southend" for example. Sure it is great for those in Southend, but not a tourist from outside the UK assuming it is handy for London, and having a 5am return flight...

London Southend is the official name - it wasn't bestowed by Ryanair.
Can't be much further timewise than London Stansted or Luton, surely?
50 minutes by train to Liverpool St, according to the website.

Gatwick on the other hand does not have London in its official name but Ruinair calls it London.

LGW verses SEN?

Ryanair don't even fly to Southend. Its Easyjet.

As does British Airways and most other airlines that fly to LGW.

There seems to be a collective wish to make Ryanair seem worse than it is, which perhaps explains the adversarial approach of OP who hasn't even flown with them yet.

It is what it is, and they are what they are, and what they are is no secret.
Take them on face value and you'll have no problem. Don't project expectations of other airlines on them.

That's possible. We also know that people are much more likely to post about bad experiences than good ones. It's the same with tripadvisor. It's not that the bad experiences didn't happen, but they are much less common than you'd think by uncritically reading Internet posts.

In the case of RyanAir, it appears to me that their business model relies heavily on fee revenue using a "no waivers, no favors" policy. Such a policy is customer-unfriendly IMHO. Some of the posts here give me hope that I will see a kinder face of RyanAir next month or at least that very few people will be surprised with fees at the airport, supporting RyanAir's claim that the fees are intended to modify behavior rather than to collect money.

I'll report on my observations either way.

I can see why you think that, but I think you're looking at it from the wrong end of the telescope.

As far as I can see their business model is to cut costs by cutting services, especially ground side services. This has to be total if it is going to deliver real savings and the only way to deter people from using and demanding things like assisted check-in etc is to charge extra. Then you can do away with fixed costs associated with check-in and baggage handling, and have it more on a "user pays"basis.

This allows the person who is able to print their own boarding passes and travel with hand luggage only, or prepay their checked luggage, to travel much cheaper and not have to bear the total cost of services they can do without. If that was so customer-unfriendly, then Ryanair would not be doing so well.

At least RyanAir can actually implement their own rules !

In principle I agree that one should read a contract before signing it and accepting Ryanair's terms and conditions is just that. Also, usage based pricing is in principle not a bad thing. Why pay for things one doesn't need.

In the case of Ryanair though, I feel that the price of some of the services is much above cost and some fees are designed to overcharge people who failed to carefully read and memorize all the terms and conditions.

How much can it e.g. cost them to print out a boading pass? Five minutes of someone's time who maybe earns 10 EUR per hour, a few cents for the paper and toner, a littel bit for the infrastructure. If the charged five euros, they would probably alread make a profit and provide enough incentive for people to change their behavior. 70 EUR or even GBP just is a rip off.

A recent example was one of our guys in a certain small European airport on Friday. He arrived just less than one hour before Ryanair flight was leaving, and there was one seat left, but nobody could sell it to him because they had closed their desk. Now, normally flights will remain open until 40 minutes or less before take off, but in this case Servisair were contracted to work check-in for Ryanair for two hours only, that is, the two hours up until one hour before take out. I think it's obvious how this saves money and you can't expect to get the same prices if they needed to employ extra staff or pay for more service.