3 ms·

100€ for a... piece of paper!?

by gpm 2y ago

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> 100€ for a... piece of paper!? For having a person who could be helping someone with real issues print a piece of paper instead, yes.
- lxgr 2y ago
  I'd be more sympathetic to that view if Ryanair didn't - Prohibit showing the QR code from a PDF on your phone (it has to be printed on physical paper, or you have to use the app instead) - Make it intentionally hard/impossible to get your boarding pass bought from a third-party reseller into their first-party app In other words, my "non-real issue" was entirely manufactured by Ryanair to extract more money from me (by frustrating third-party resellers without outright banning them in a way that makes them prone to competitive lawsuits)
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    To be clear, those are problems. But a fee for a boarding-pass print only exceeding the cost of the paper it’s printed on is totally reasonable.
- gpm 2y ago
  How much do you have to pay to get to the point where 100€ would be anything remotely close to the actual costs? If your support person is literally doing nothing 59/60ths of the time (because they're waiting around for someone to help), and it takes a whole minute to print a ticket... you're still at 100€/hour. This doesn't seem like it can be anything but ripping people off for making a mistake, or as charitably as I can possibly get making people who made a mistake subsidize flights for the more meticulous people in an attempt to make tickets (appear to) cost less to get more business.
lxgr 2y ago
Yup. I think it was approximately 150€ when this happened to me. There's even an entire second-order cottage industry benefiting from that practice: At the airport I was trying to board, there was a copyshop offering PDF printouts for 50 cent a page (yay) – except if the page is a boarding pass, for which the rate is then 10€. Yes, they employ a person to specifically check what you're printing...
arp242 2y ago
RyanAir's business model is hyper-aggressive penny-pinching on basically everything that allows pinching pennies. The costs are so high because they want to really really disincentive people from using staff for this kind of thing, so on average they won't have to hire as much staff. This is one reason why some RyanAir flights can be as low as €20 (whereas e.g. KLM is €200 for a similar or identical flight). On bigger airports it's not a huge problem because you can typically use the machines, which are free.

100€ for a... piece of paper!?

by gpm 2y ago

100€ for a... piece of paper!?

> 100€ for a... piece of paper!? For having a person who could be helping someone with real issues print a piece of paper instead, yes.

lxgr 2y ago
I'd be more sympathetic to that view if Ryanair didn't - Prohibit showing the QR code from a PDF on your phone (it has to be printed on physical paper, or you have to use the app instead) - Make it intentionally hard/impossible to get your boarding pass bought from a third-party reseller into their first-party app In other words, my "non-real issue" was entirely manufactured by Ryanair to extract more money from me (by frustrating third-party resellers without outright banning them in a way that makes them prone to competitive lawsuits)
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  To be clear, those are problems. But a fee for a boarding-pass print only exceeding the cost of the paper it’s printed on is totally reasonable.
gpm 2y ago
How much do you have to pay to get to the point where 100€ would be anything remotely close to the actual costs? If your support person is literally doing nothing 59/60ths of the time (because they're waiting around for someone to help), and it takes a whole minute to print a ticket... you're still at 100€/hour. This doesn't seem like it can be anything but ripping people off for making a mistake, or as charitably as I can possibly get making people who made a mistake subsidize flights for the more meticulous people in an attempt to make tickets (appear to) cost less to get more business.

lxgr 2y ago

Yup. I think it was approximately 150€ when this happened to me. There's even an entire second-order cottage industry benefiting from that practice: At the airport I was trying to board, there was a copyshop offering PDF printouts for 50 cent a page (yay) – except if the page is a boarding pass, for which the rate is then 10€. Yes, they employ a person to specifically check what you're printing...

arp242 2y ago

RyanAir's business model is hyper-aggressive penny-pinching on basically everything that allows pinching pennies. The costs are so high because they want to really really disincentive people from using staff for this kind of thing, so on average they won't have to hire as much staff. This is one reason why some RyanAir flights can be as low as €20 (whereas e.g. KLM is €200 for a similar or identical flight). On bigger airports it's not a huge problem because you can typically use the machines, which are free.