That is ... pretty rich.

A couple of years ago I was going to go see my brother in the UK who lived near Stansted. As such Ryanair would have been the most convenient airline. The shere number of dark patterns I encountered trying to book the ticket was such that when I got to the payment page and they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread in the exchange rate I rage quit. I should have known better even then, but now I will only use them if I have literally no other choice. With luck that means "never."

I'm always happy to see the various EU competition authorities pushing back on this kind of thing.

And I am also always confused about the non-transparency that people mention about their fees. When you do the checkout, you select the services you want and pay for those. There used to be a time when other airlines would have a lot of things included in the basic ticket price, but that's not the case anymore, so it's not different. And I think this was an inevitable in an industry with small profit margins where price differentiation would bring gains.

Legitimately welcoming discussion here as I'm keen to hear the other side.

The "verification" workflow is super obtrusive: either pay them to use facial recognition technology or do slower verification (which I assume would be too slow if you saw this last minute). If you missed the email, you'd end up having to pay 55 eur to fix the issue. I was able to complain to customer service but it was definitely incredibly user hostile, intrusive and just ridiculous given that I booked directly via their site.

> Dear AAA this booking, AABBCC, appears to have been made through a third-party travel agent who has no commercial relationship with Ryanair to sell our flights. Therefore, Ryanair has blocked this booking.

> As third-party travel agents often do not provide Ryanair with the correct passenger email address and payment details, we need to verify a passenger's identity before they can manage their booking and check-in online.

> Ryanair needs to carry out this verification process in order to ensure we can comply with safety and security requirements.

> Once a passenger on the bookings has completed Ryanair's verification process, we will provide full access to the booking, including to the ability to make changes to the booking, add additional services, and complete online check-in.

> Express Verification is available at a cost of EUR 0.59c per booking.

> This fee covers the cost of the verification. Ryanair does not benefit commercially from this. There is no charge for Standard Verification.

> Passengers who do not avail of online verification (Express Verification or Standard Verification) to verify their bookings can verify at the Ryanair ticket desk in the airport, however they will be charged an airport check-in fee of up to €/£55.

For flight hacks wiht Ryanair, try kiwi.com As far as I understand they also cover the financial risk should there be a problem with the connection.

It turns out, they aren’t - there is a ton of fine print and if you happen to qualify they “refund” you in miles

Both in the US and Europe, it’d be great if the government used some of their overreaching powers they use to pass laws to spy on us to also pass laws to protect us as consumers for products and services across the board

It would be a decent consolation prize

Sort of off topic here but lack of consumer protection AND shitty airlines across the world are both subjects that really trigger me (not really)

I wonder how that works out for them.

I also wonder if the time is ripe for some company to disrupt advertising by simply doing what google did on launch in 2000.

"Ryanair’s tactics included rolling out facial recognition procedures for people who bought tickets via a third party, claiming that was necessary for security. It then “totally or intermittently blocked booking attempts by travel agencies”, including by blocking payment methods and mass-deleting accounts. The airline then “imposed partnership agreements” on agencies which banned sales of Ryanair flights in combinations with other carriers, and blocked bookings to force them to sign up. Only in April this year did it allow agencies’ websites to link up with its own services, allowing effective competition. The competition authority said Ryanair’s actions had “blocked, hindered or made such purchases more difficult and/or economically or technically burdensome when combined with flights operated by other carriers and/or other tourism and insurance services”.