It's easy to book a Ryanair ticket without being upsold. You select the ticket, probably add a bag for about £40, skip the car rental and hotels screens etc, then book. What's the problem?
So you're using Ryanair's own-issued payment card, to avoid the mandatory fees it charges for every other payment option?
You forgot to mention picking the "No I don't need travel insurance" option shoved in the middle of the list of travel insurance prices, which defaults to you buying travel insurance from Ryanair.
Do you already have their spyware app installed and tracking you on your phone, to avoid being charged £50 for a plain boarding pass which you print yourself?
You're describing some other airline's website, surely. If you'd used Ryanair's site you would not be unaware of its fuckery.
Dark patterns are still sketchy and unconscionable, regardless of how easy you find them to get past. They're put there by unscrupulous businesses to catch some people -- can you say no Ryanair customer has ever accidentally purchased Ryanair insurance they didn't need?
Similarly, their latest wheeze, that you skipped over, is to compel people to use their "app". The trading standards regulators need to smack Ryanair about the head with a cricket bat and again force them not to apply such bollocks.
> Indeed, when I checked in for my 12 November flight to Germany a day ahead, I was told: “Make sure to print and bring your boarding passes to the airport or access them through the Ryanair app” and even “boarding passes must be printed for use”.
> But Ryanair says those are no longer acceptable. Oddly, though, you can use a paper boarding pass that is printed out at the airport by ground staff working for Ryanair – at no charge.
Such utter bollocks. They are totally capable of accepting paper boarding passes (or screenshots or PDFs of boarding passes shown on a phone -- better airlines let you download a PDF from their website once checked in, and you can put it on your phone or print it out; no proprietary app needed), they just want to compel you to install their app and get tracked and dinged and marketed at and upsold up the wazoo with zero benefit to you. It is not necessary at all, and I will continue to never travel with them.
If you take your time and read carefully. Because sometimes the colored choice is free, and sometimes it is the non-colored one. 100% dark pattern. As is disabling "paste" on check-in, forcing you to remember the 6-alphanumeric char booking code if you do not have a second device/pen&paper at hand.
This is an odd story. Ryanair doesn't pay commission, so these resellers make money by charging extra fees to unsuspecting customers. I don't know why Ryanair wants to stamp out this practice (which doesn't cost them anything and brings extra sales), but I don't see why they should be prevented from stamping it out.
Ryanair (and to an extent other LCCs) generally doesn't like ticket sales through resellers because a substantial part of its profit margin comes from upsell of add-ons and partner services during the booking/reservation process
> Why isn't Ryanair allowed to prohibit use of their website by resellers?
To give a more general answer than the sibling comment, setting conditions on how a product may be used usually distorts the market, harms buyers, and reduces competition, naturally to the benefit of the one setting the conditions.
For example selling cars that you're not allowed to use for "professional" use, only personal (as Nvidia does with forbidding datacenter use of some of its GPUs, charging extra for it). There was also a self-driving company that forbade buyers from using their cars to create a taxi service, essentially reserving that market for themselves. It may have been Tesla, but I can't find the story right now. In general living in a world where we need manufacturer's permission to do anything is less than ideal.
In this case I'm sure Ryanair would like to spin it as resellers upcharging customers, but by complete coincidence, their practices also prevent someone knowledgeable in all their dark patterns from protecting customers from them by acting as an intermediary.
It's a restraint of trade issue. You're not allowed to restrain other's people's ability to run a business or earn an income, beyond some reasonable cases.
Like running the only gas station in town and then refusing to sell fuel to a competitor who is trying to build a gas station that wants to compete with you.
That is not analogous, as online travel agencies are just middlemen. I am not aware of a law anywhere requiring a seller to have to deal with middlemen.
I guess because travel agencies need to be able to show customers the most economical flights?
By prohibiting agencies on their website, they can not give consumers (through their agents) the ability to compare different choices.
There's also the issue that you're making apples-to-pears comparison if Ryanair shows up in results. While Air France and British Airways have largely equivalent products, Ryanair's is...different.
If you had ever purchased a RyanAir ticket you would understand. You get up charged for everything and have to deselect all the up charges at multiple screens. It is their operating model to sell basically free seats, and profit on upsells. Third parties eliminate a large portion of their upsell pipeline.
Ryanair is cheap, they charge extra for everything. But the tradeoff is you get where you are going for cheap if you avoid all the extras, including bottled water.
The funny part is how most OTAs are pretty awful with addons themselves. I know for a fact that certain OTAs will sell tickets at a loss hoping you trip up on one of their checkboxes, like the 15€ automatic checkin service many offer.
I just now booked a ticket on gotogate, paid 80 euro and received a receipt from ITA airways for 120 euro. They apparently lost 40 euro on this sale, I only had to click "no" on about 18 questions.
I feel that a lot of OTAs will just not refund you when a flight is cancelled, especially if it's not one of the more reputable ones. Is that what happened here? How did you fix it?
In my case in 2020 I had to request my refund via PayPal for Vayama
> so these resellers make money by charging extra fees to unsuspecting customers
I don't think thats correct, people who use travel agents do so because they like the service or are unable to book for themselves, it's not wrong to offer a service and be paid for it and there isn't any broad evidence that travel agents misrepresent anything.
"Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay is thought to be seeking a guaranteed subsidised price of about £168 for every megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity it generates over a 35-year period – almost four times the current market price of power." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/11426...
That's for the first plant, the other 7 are expected to cost the same as the recent nuclear power deal for Hinckley C. That's in the BBC article.
I actually think that's pretty amazing as a first off price. By contrast, solar panels have only got to where they are today because governments (principally but not exclusively in Germany) subsidized them for decades at two to three times that level. God know how many billions of subsidies have gone in nuclear, and the strike price is still high. Or, for that matter, into traditional energy technology and infrastructure.
Many new technologies do require up front subsidies in order to develop, and that's sensible as long as there is a credible path to reducing the cost. Solar panels are just now starting to become competitive, if this technology could do it second or third time out, that is something to be lauded.
At GBP1bn for 320MW, this doesn't look too good. If the numbers on wikipedia for the Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Station [0] are right (254MW for GBP180m), this is prohibitively expensive, even for the technology.
I'd assume that 35 years of inflation needs to be factored in as well, at 2% that would half subsidy by that point. Also, there is an inherent cost to green power, if it was cheap power companies would flock to build them of their own accord, but of course they dont, so the government has to subside them.
If something has negative externalities, the solution is to tax the externality. E.g. a carbon tax will raise the price of fossil-fuel energy, which will make some green energy projects worth building. That's it -- job done.
Subsidising "good" projects is instead of taxing bad projects is the wrong way to do it, because the government has to evaluate every project proposal to figure out which projects should be subsidised. Whereas a carbon tax does it for you; all the government needs to figure out is the cost of carbon, and the market takes care of the rest.
Timestamp this and come back in three years because we are basically sitting on the tipping point of some clean energy sources (not the one in this article!) becoming cost competitive. Solar and wind are at grid parity in an increasing number of places (Deutsche Bank says 47 of 50 states by 2016) and innovations in financing will be able to pick up the slack if/when subsidies expire.
I'm surprised you rate "The Spirit Level". I think it's a pack of lies, partly because of Chris Snowden's book but mainly Tino Sanandaji's many posts about it on his blog. The most devastating criticisms are
1. They use data from a UN report from a particular year. Except for one reference, they use a report from a different year. It turns out that this report contains data which supports their argument, but all the other years disprove it.
2. They use a mysterious sample of countries. When a larger sample is used, the effect goes away or reverses.
More generally, the whole argument is nutty. If you spot an apparent correlation, you have to come up with some causal mechanism. Inequality is supposed to somehow make people unhealthy, through envy or something... nuts.
