9 ms·
Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights (2018)
- fatnoah 6y ago>Ryanair is a wonderful example of two extremes - it’s one of the worst possible airlines that nickel and dimes you for everything, it’s not a great employer, and it is rated the worst European airline; however, it’s dirt cheap. This is an interesting conclusion. I would say that being cheap and terrible are not two extremes, but the same one.
- agustif 6y agoWell, no -cheap- is good, at least for the consumer paying the ticket. that's what has keept them in business so far I think. Sometimes it's so cheap all other stuff might be palatable if you're getting a 10x price reduction vs another ticket
- tyingq 6y agoRyanair is a bit beyond the pale...worse than Spirit here in the US. They've planned in the past, for example, to charge a fee for using the toilet. And a different plan to remove them in favor of more seats. Neither panned out, but still.
- yyy888sss 6y agoNot really, the CEO just says crazy things to drum up some publicity. He also claimed he would charge fat people more, and that Ryanair was so frugal that they didn't let employees charge their phone at work to save electricity.
- tyingq 6y agoStill speaks to the expected experience to me.
- bjelkeman-again 6y agoI am convinced that the talk about charging for using the toilet is just a diversion. You have passengers complaining about charging extra for everything but they end with “Well, at least I don’t have to pay for going to the toilet.” I think it is just clever marketing.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoI disagree. In my opinion, he was simply testing the waters to see if there would be a lot of pushback. This is kinda how microtransactions eventually became standard. Gamers are not very patient customers and any talk of voting with wallet rarely gains traction.
- rsynnott 6y agoNah; it would have been illegal, as was pointed out at the time. He was doing it for the publicity.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoIt is going to sound very cynical, but something being illegal is not always something that would stop a company from doing things. Laws being enforced could and even then it depends on whether it is enforced gently.
- rsynnott 6y agoThere are some laws that companies will sometimes try to publicly flaunt. In general, laws around aviation safety aren't on the list; very expensive when all your planes get grounded.
- anthonybennis 6y agoThis is part of the brand building. Ryanair want you to associate their name with cheap and those headlines are deliberately encouraged by their CEO who will use every trick in the book if he gets PR out of it. On a side note, I don't think Ryanair are terrible. They're punctual and have seats that cannot recline, which to me is a positive flight experience.
- rsynnott 6y agoThat was a joke by the CEO. However, they have investigated (and I believe are still investigating) whether it would be possible to have a standing plane. To be honest, for the Dublin to London route it wouldn't be too bad.
- empath75 6y agoSouthwest airlines is inexpensive and pleasant. It's possible.
- exhilaration 6y agoSouthwest is far more expensive than Spirit and Frontier. Those are true discount airlines and similar Ryanair.
- toast0 6y agoSouthwest wants you to believe they're inexpensive. But they don't allow themselves to be easily compared. You can't see their fares except on their webpage, not on a travel search. They include bags and others don't which can be nice, but makes comparison difficult. Etc.
- saagarjha 6y agoYou can something be cheap and great, or expensive and terrible. They’re different things.
- alharith 6y agoFor example: KFC is cheap and tastes great. Big Baller Brand is expensive and is terrible.
- stormdennis 6y agoYes but if you have half a brain you can travel real cheap. Who needs a big bag, or to be fed on 2 hour flight? People want cheap tickets plus all the frills and that's not the deal they signed up for with Ryanair
- nerdponx 6y agoAt least you have a cheap option. On US domestic airlines you pay $300 round trip NYC to Chicago and still have to pay for carry-on baggage. Although you do still get a free soda and bag of pretzels.
- airstrike 6y agoSoda and a bag of pretzels is probably the cheapest possible snack one can manufacture in the US. Bread and water would probably be more expensive.
- Invictus0 6y agoWrong. JFK-ORD July 2, 9am-10:49am direct; July 5 12pm-3:21pm direct on JetBlue with 1 free carryon, is only $89 roundtrip. Flight is B6 1105 and B6 906.
- nerdponx 6y agoFlights right now are unnaturally cheap.
- tathougies 6y agoAm I the only one that loves Ryan air. Great, no-nonsense pricing, no-nonsense service, and they do exactly what you pay them for.
- madaxe_again 6y agoNot always. I’ve spent 36 hours stuck at a gate with no plane in sight with them, before they finally cancelled the flight - mechanical issues with the aircraft, apparently - and they always find a way to worm out of the EC compensation directive, mostly by just flatly refusing to engage. Still waiting for the refund, nearly a year on - they give themselves 250 working days to issue refunds. They also have poorly trained pilots, who either aren’t qualified for ILS or aren’t confident in poor conditions - on numerous occasions I’ve been on flights which they’ve diverted (Bristol becomes Birmingham, Bergerac becomes Toulouse, Porto becomes Madrid) because of weather, while other airlines land and take off without issue.
- throwawayflyboy 6y ago> They also have poorly trained pilots, who either aren’t qualified for ILS or aren’t confident in poor conditions - on numerous occasions I’ve been on flights which they’ve diverted (Bristol becomes Birmingham, Bergerac becomes Toulouse, Porto becomes Madrid) because of weather, while other airlines land and take off without issue. This is straight-up defamatory. Ryanair have similar entry requirements to the majors, much better training and equipment, and the best safety record of any airline in the world. No one gets an EASA Part FCL without ILS, and every Ryanair pilot will be absolutely confident in ILS approaches - most will have done far more than other airline pilots.
- elygre 6y agoI have no reason to doubt that their pilots are trained as well as other pilots. However, I also have no reason to believe they are trained any better. Do you have any reference to the claim of "much better training" and "far more [ILS approaches] than other airline pilots"?
- 6y ago
- philjohn 6y agoExcept there have been other low-cost airlines that are now, sadly, defunct who had a decent service (still no frills, but less of the nickel and diming) and were low cost - Monarch and FlyBE. Monarch especially was great as they had a direct flight from my old local airport to Gibraltar.
- jmoss20 6y agoIf they were the same extreme, then it would be impossible to be expensive and terrible. Unfortunately...
- vmception 6y agoRyanair can only possibly be the worst rated European airline because everyone uses it. There are plenty of budget airlines between obscure routes in Europe that are the same caliber.
- stormdennis 6y agoThanks to Ryanair a flight that started at 140 pounds in 1986 can be had for less that 20 today.i know someone who had to pay 400 for it when they needed to get to a funeral.
- switch007 6y agoThat is in no way an apples to apples comparison. £140 would have probably included things like baggage, more leg room, perhaps less restrictive ticket terms and food on a full service airline with eg better IRROPS handling.
- stormdennis 6y agoBelieve it or not it's a half hour flight, (the alternative is a ferry and drive/bus). It was a scandal what inefficient national carriers were able to get away with in those days. Most people had to do the long bus trip, 15 hours because flying was too expensive.
- switch007 6y agoThanks for the sarcasm but yes I do believe it. That's a different topic though.
- stormdennis 6y agoI don't love Ryanair but the people who criticise them remind me of the Woody Allen joke about the diners complaining about the restaurant, "The food was terrible and the portions! So small!"
- dragosmocrii 6y agoI had a technical assignment with an online air tickets seller, and the requirement was to build the backend for a service that will find routes between airports. aboy was it a fun assignment. As the nodes increase, the time to search the graph for routes increases exponentially. non stop routes would yield the result in milliseconds, 1 stop about 1 second, 2 stops around 40 seconds, 3 stops about 4 minutes, 4 stops.. well I didn't wait for that :) I had engineered a dataset of flights and airports from a puclic source, for a couple thousands airports, and a couple tens of thousands of flights. graph theory is very interesting subject. Turns out, my solution was overkill, and I got the job, but 2 months later Corona happened, so now I'm back to freelancing :D * If you're curious about the implementation, see https://github.com/DragosMocrii/flights-search-app https://github.com/DragosMocrii/flights-search-app
- agustif 6y agoRyanair is like Gmail, the more the price of something tends to zero, the more you're ready to put up with bullshit like (Google reading your mail, or obnoxious ads on your inbox, etc)
- krn 6y agoRyanair is like McDonald's of air travel. I have taken well over 50 flights with them over the last decade, and never had a bad experience, because I always knew what to expect. In general, it's not worth paying more than 50-60 EUR for a one-way ticket, and it's not worth expecting any compensations or support if something goes wrong. Nobody expects a restaurant experience from a fast-food chain.
- 5etho 6y agothe thing is, thanks to eu you have a support, also legal rights as every airline
- krn 6y agoIn theory, yes. In practice, it would often cost more in time to actually obtain anything from a low-cost airline in Europe than the compensation was worth. I strongly believe that if one wants the level of customer service of a traditional airline, (s)he should be flying with a traditional airline, – and paying for it.
- saadalem 6y agoReminds me a little bit of Exploring the Complexity of Driving Directions https://jsomers.net/blog/directions https://jsomers.net/blog/directions
- bmc7505 6y agoThere was a discussion here the other day about the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, which is today known as a Eulerian path. [1] Unlike Eulerian paths, which are detectable in linear time [2], detecting Hamiltonian paths is NP-complete [3]. Does anyone have an intuitive explanation for why this is the case? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23123754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23123754 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulerian_path#Hierholzer's_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulerian_path#Hierholzer's_alg... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamiltonian_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamiltonian_path
- jcranmer 6y ago> Does anyone have an intuitive explanation for why this is the case? Imagine building a Eulerian path. You're standing at a node, trying to figure out which edge to go down next. Eventually, because it's a Eulerian path, you'll have to go down all the edges eventually. This means it doesn't matter which edge you go down--even if your path hits a dead end, you can magically go back in time and patch in a cycle to your original path. Put another way, if you establish that a graph has a Eulerian path, every maximal set of edge-disjoint cycles in the graph constitutes that path. Just by looking and making decisions at a very localized context (every node), you can formulate a correct answer. By contrast, Hamiltonian paths are rarer. Only some maximal sets of node-disjoint cycles can be combined to construct a Hamiltonian path. You don't have the property that you can trivially patch the cycles together if you make a mistake. Looking at a node and trying to decide which next node to pick, you'd have to understand the structure of the entire graph very well to understand if traversing to A will screw you up, and the ramifications are not local.
- bssrdf 6y agoThis book <<The Nature of Computation>>[0] has the best explanation I have ever seen. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Computation-Cristopher-Moore-dp-0199233217/dp/0199233217/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1589226680 https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Computation-Cristopher-Moore-d...
- charlus 6y agoI always really enjoy reading graph algorithm pieces, and similarly after studying them have never actually used them. A really nice approach to a fun problem.
- joyj2nd 6y agoMy experience with Ryanair ist pretty good. If (big if) you know what to expect. I had terrible experiences with Wizz and United and avoid them like the plague. Ryanair is cheap. Tickets can be 9.99, 12.99 Euros. (One Way). I have often speculatively bought these tickets for a trip that might or might not occur and then let them expire. Obviously this is part of their business strategy. But Ryanair is great. By the way, Kiwi.com also searches flights with Ryanair connecting flights (AKA Flight hacks). They once offered me a 50 Euros trip from Duesseldorf to Malta with 5 tickets, including going to Bucharest, Berlin etc. I would have been on the road/in the air for two days.
- JadeNB 6y agoI forget how long we ask for between duplicates, so maybe it's OK, but this also appeared closer to when it was written: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18526261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18526261 .
- dang 6y agoThe cutoff is about a year (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). However, there was also a major thread a few months ago, so this is clearly a dupe. More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23146996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23146996
- dang 6y agoThis had a big thread just a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22100736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22100736) so this repost is clearly a dupe. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. There was also a big thread at the time (2018): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18526261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18526261. Since the cutoff is about a year, that repost was ok, but the current one was not ok.
- jonluca 6y agoGotcha, thanks! Will keep the 1 year rule in mind