Well all this Ryanair bashing has made me want to actually fly with them again. And here's why.
Firstly, let's get the booking confirmation out the way:
Ryanair Travel Itinerary - Don't Forget You MUST Check-in Online and Print Off your Boarding Pass
Could they make it any clearer?
Now on to the reality of pricing and service. For anyone who says other airlines are more "pleasant", then fair enough, but if you want to fly to/from BHX and actually go somewhere interesting, your main options for low cost one way sectors (ie come home from somewhere different) are now really just Flybe and Ryanair - not that baby going made any difference here!
Caveat - unlike the passengers who grumble, I don't have any excess baggage, including kids, and I like to visit new places. To be honest, this makes me much more tolerant of Ryanair than most people might otherwise be, but if everyone else hated them that much, they wouldn't still be in business.
So I say to myself - "where do Flybe go that I haven't already been to" - basically narrows it down to Hamburg, west of Ireland and Dubrovnik - so an easy win for the latter as I've never been to Croatia.
As this is one of Flybe's more distant destinations, I wasn't expecting any bargain basement offers, so when I saw the
last outbound of the season for £56, I thought great, book it.
Just remember here -
this is the flight nobody else wants. No romantic weekenders, no families, not sure how many Croatians come to the UK for the summer - remember they aren't in the EU.
Then I go to Ryanair, who happen to be having one of their usual big splash sales on - BHX-TRS for £18. How much to go the other way I wonder - often these a priced with a low outbound as a sweetener, but not this time - €18 for the return, obviously no £12 APD this time, but that INCLUDES the £6 card fee which I could have avoided if I was a more regular Ryanair user.
I do still have one of those euro prepay cards, so no hidden currency fees. Incidentally - also booking a new year ferry trip to NORTHERN Ireland, they want £5 for my card AND they are charging in euros!
So Ryanair still comes out just under 1/3 the cost of Flybe - and as I always want a window seat, that is also easier to get with the Ryanair freeforall than with an airline that charges you to select one.
For this, I will put up with those gaudy yellow interiors!