With low cost carrier Ryanair forever finding more ways to separate customers from their money, we're not sure if this newest innovation is something to help passengers or yet another commercial venture.
Ryanair has just launched a Flight Tracker service, which will send text messages to registered passengers in Britain and Ireland about arrival and departure times, and notify you "on those rare occasions when a Ryanair flight is delayed". It costs £1.50 ($3) to register your phone number for a particular flight, and after that, the updates are sent to you for free.
Cynics have suggested there are plenty of web-based services who'll send you such messages for free, but Ryanair's proud that you don't need to know your flight number for its tracker--you can call up and get registered with just your departure date and route. But can't you just look up your flight number?
The good ship Ryanair has remained an oak among other sapling LCCs that have gotten ripped up in the whirlwind of rising oil prices and a near global recession. But a new foe for free flights emerged this week in the form of an EU mandate that will require airlines to pay for the harm they do to the environment. CEO Michael O'Leary said this could turn into a green surcharge for fliers.
With plans to double in size in the next four years, the new payments to Brussels could cost Ryanair upwards of €250 million, half its 2007 profits. O'Leary defended the airline saying its been a trailblazer, flying planes slower than average for the last 10 years specifically to save fuel, a practice most airlines are just now introducing.
The EU wants to put the mandate into effect by 2011, so there's still some time to get crunk in a random foreign city for little to no cost. But maybe it's time for the Europeans to start investigating some alternative fuels?
Hot on the heels of our prediction that the European budget airline industry is in trouble, we're instantly proven wrong with a bunch of new route announcements from SkyEurope and Ryanair.
In the next couple of months, SkyEurope will start new flights including Kosice (eastern Slovakia) to England, Poprad (northern Slovakia) to London and more regular flights between Slovak cities and Prague.
Ryanair meanwhile is launching 14 new routes, including service to four completely new destinations: Agadir, Nador and Tangier in Morocco and Lille in northern France.
We'll have to wait till the end of the summer to see if these new routes actually pay their way. Get in while they're still available!
Two of the European low cost carriers we like to complain about most, EasyJet and Ryanair,
have apparently been the subject of complaints from others, too. Since neither of them have allocated seating, they both have programs where passengers can pay extra to be one of the first to board. But there's trouble in boarding paradise.
Britain's Trading Standards Office has been looking into a few complaints about priority boarding, particularly that passengers who've paid extra end up on a bus out to the plane with those who haven't, and don't get any boarding advantage at all. Unless they're really good at shoving and pushing, that is.
The Trading Standards people say this is all verging on fraud, and have put the airlines on notice that they're being watched. So are we.
We naïvely thought a budget airline was supposed to help us get places cheaply. But European LCC Ryanair is doing its absolute best to take the "low cost" out of low cost carrier: Now it's scrapping the free priority boarding for those who check in online.
Last August, Ryanair started charging passengers for physically checking in at the airport rather than online, which meant passengers taking baggage had to pay both a luggage charge and a check-in charge, as you couldn't print a boarding pass at home if you had bags. In January, the airline increased those costs.
The latest additional charge is for anyone who wants priority boarding. (That is, you get to fight for a seat with the first lot of passengers, rather than straggle on when most seats are already taken.) This privilege will now cost £4 ($8), regardless of check-in style. Up to 40 percent of passengers can buy priority boarding, so it's not even guaranteeing you a fantastic seat. We'd probably just skip it.
Ryanair may have a smokin' hot cabin crew but that does little to placate the increasing number of Treviso-bound passengers who are being re-routed to other airports to land.
The main excuses are fog, rain and low visibility. Instead of landing at Treviso, flights are sent all over Northern Italy and then passengers are bussed back. The most frequent detour seems to be to Brescia (2 hour bus ride away).
University of London student, Patrick Kendrick, gives us the play by play from his recent $125 London to Treviso (to Brescia) flight:
Better buy those Ryanair tickets soon. The LCC is going offline from February 22 until February 25, and you won't be able to call in ticket orders either. The airline says it's switching over to a new flight booking system and has no choice but to go dark.
Three days? Are they building the new servers by hand? The good news is that the change over will likely make Ryanair's pricing schemes more transparent. The carrier has dodged deadlines until now that require European airlines to include all non-optional costs in advertised prices. Industry watchers suspect that when Ryanair's back online it'll be in compliance with the rules.
There's more good news, too. During the service outage you'll be allowed to check in at the airport without paying the usual fee. Of course, the problem there is that you'll have to check in at the airport.
With all the excitement over on-board WiFi announcements here in the United States, it's easy to forget that carriers abroad have already wrapped up their testing of in-flight Internet. More than a couple airlines have had passengers successfully texting their sucker friends "Guess where I am right now?!" Among them are Qantas, Ryanair, Air France, Singapore Airlines and Emirates.
These carriers are using a satellite technology developed by a company called EMS Technologies. Because the system is space- rather than land-based, passengers can use cell phones, PDAs and laptops over the ocean. That's a major plus for carriers like Qantas and Singapore.
While pricing is still, ahem, up in the air, we can't imagine it will be that much. And for a lot of people, EMS's CEO realizes, the cost won't really even be a factor:
If I'm flying from Paris to New York and Air France lets me use my Blackberry in-flight while United Airlines doesn't, which one do you think I'm going to choose?
