Ryanair: institutional contempt for passengers?

Buy a Ryanair ticket, and you get told very firmly: Check in at least 40 minutes before you fly, or you don't go. Firm, but at least clear from the outset.

But when you do check in, you discover an extra rule - be at the Departure Gate by the time written on your Boarding Pass or you don't fly. It says this in big red letters on the back of the Boarding Pass.

On the surface, that seems fair enough too. But wait. The time they are demanding you get to the gate is (from two recent experiences) 40 minutes before takeoff. So if you check in close to the deadline there is no possible way that you are going to meet this rule. And whilst they clearly do need you to be at the gate in time to load the plane, when did you ever see the doors of a Ryanair flight closed at even 25 minutes before takeoff?

Example from Liverpool Airport:

• Departure at 06.30
• Check-in deadline 05.50
• Gate deadline 05.50
  

So if you check in at 05.40 (10 minutes clear of the deadline that you were given when booking) you find that you have just 10 minutes to get through security, and walk to the gate. At larger airports the walking alone could take more than that. And queues for security can take far, far longer at any airport.

Ryanair know this, but they still tell passengers that 40-minute checkin is acceptable, and then issue an impossible-to-appease threat to the passenger who has met their rule.

Experienced travellers know when they can get away with 40-minute checkin and when that is dangerous. And they know that as long as you have managed to check in a bag, then being late at the gate is the airline's problem rather than yours - if they did want to fly without you, security rules require that they would have to leave your checked-in bag behind too, and currently that involves going through the bags in the hold, one by one to find yours (RFID may change this, I guess). And that is not a five-minute task.

But less-experienced passengers won't know that this an empty threat. And these people will suffer a lot of extra - and quite unnecessary - stress from reaching the 40-minute "gate deadline" time when they are still stuck in a queue for security.

At the very least this extra stress makes flying less pleasant, and reduces passengers' propensity to travel in future. At worst, the passengers' extra stress adds to the general stress in the queues, and makes life more miserable for even the experienced travellers. One might expect this to excite Ryanair as important, but seemingly not.

And (although I am sure that this doesn't excite Rynaiar at all) I guess that airport security staff would preferred dealing with less-stressed passengers.

Why do Ryanair do it?

When it comes to earning money, Ryanair don't miss a trick. But one occasionally one wonders whether their approach to Customer Care is a little warped. In choosing a low-frills airline, the customer should understand that some of the missing "frills" will be in Customer Service. But at Ryanair, one sometimes senses that they have developed an institutional indifference to the customer's sensibilities - and some of what they do makes you wonder if they are getting close to downright contempt for their passengers.

Once upon a time, I used to write directly to companies about this sort of idiocy, but the rarity of a sensible reply led me to give that up as a waste of time. But if anyone from Ryanair does happen upon this item, I would be pleased to add your comments to this posting.