Ryanair and "Priority Boarding"
 

Has anyone noticed what Ryanair sneaked in to a news item on their website underneath their Stockholm and Warsaw route launches?:

"Passengers travelling with checked in luggage will (from 1st November) be able to enjoy priority boarding at departure gates for £2/€3 per flight. These passengers will then be entitled to board the aircraft first and choose their seats. This will be particularly advantageous for families and groups who wish to travel together."

"From 1st November, families with children will no longer be pre-boarded however they will have the option of online check-in and priority boarding if travelling without checked in luggage or priority boarding purchased at the airport if travelling with checked in bags."

Obviously we all know FR are mean, etc etc etc and we could go on about them all day but they are becoming very family-unfriendly. So if they don't want families, people with luggage, disabled people, business people who want changeable tickets, people who have UK drivers licences but were born outside the EU, who do they want?! Sounding a little like an airline version of National Socialism starting in Dublin.........

XSB

rE
 

YES i did read that ,Just another money spinning exercise can,t blame them really .End of the day all seats are the same except emeg xit .You all arrive at the same place at the same time and if you have a baby then most people will offer assitance that is part of life :) :) well done Ryanair MAYBE even cheaper fares

This is an interesting further development. For years I have been pointing out that the so-called "Legacy" airlines should work harder to differentiate themselves from the locos. Now, lo and behold, locos are moving, slowly but surely, towards offering legacy service - at a cost of course. The logical conclusion is that the aircraft will be reconfigured to have larger seats, that recline and where free food and drinks are offered, which will be located, probably, at the front of the aircraft, while the no-pay cattle class remain at the back end. And maybe even there will be a "frequent slumming" (sorry, "flyer") programme to reward serial masochists?

Seriously though, I wonder how far FR will go down this road? It is more than time that flag/legacy carriers woke up to this and did something about it in a more meaningful fashion.

Maybe this is heading towards reserved seats and multiple classes, but I doubt it. All they're doing is charging for priority boarding, in other words making queue jumping available to anyone who pays for it, rathert than giving it away for free for certain people as they do at the moment.
One question though- A parent with a 4 and a 6 year old get onto the plane to discover 3 seats left spread all over the plane. After it's pointed out that they should have stumped up for priority boarding, what happens next?

That's exactly what happened to my wife + 2 kids on Iberia. Answer: shrug of shoulders from crew until a teenager agreed to swap seats while the adult pax pretended to be deaf.:ugh:

She's flying the same route with the kids on Saturday - I advised her to take two paper bags so that if it happens again she can hand them to the people sitting next to my kids and tell them that they sometimes get sick on take-off and landing! That should expedite the seat swaps.:E

slightly OT, but an important one,

How do you know the adult pax was 'pretending' to be deaf.

I ask this because I regularly travel with someone who has a hearing deficit, and who usually cannot hear someone speaking to him in an aircraft, due to background noise. Often he gets people who get irritated that assume he is just ignoring them.

It is a sad fact, that most people have zero understanding of hearing loss, which in early stages, typically manifests itself as an inability to discriminate sounds (speech) against background noise.

My friend can hold a completely unaided conversation provided there is no background noise, but really struggles in any noisy situation. He has even had rude cc before, due to this (although good airlines train their staff to recognise this well). Few people with a hearing deficit have the stereotype two BIG beige hearing aids that whistle, as not all hearing deficits benefit from such devices. It is, I have reliably been told, a much more complex issue than just 'turning up the volume'.

I don't doubt you had good reason to know the adult pax was pretending to be deaf, but maybe,just maybe, he wasn't.

Flying_frisbee that was kind of what my first thoughts were - the cabin crew, if they are willing to help, will then have to look for people willing to swap seats, maybe the kids will be screaming being away from parents, leading to more fuss on boarding and perhaps short delays.

I remember about 4 years ago a friend of mine was a base supervisor for FR and one of her flights was delayed about 5 mins due to pax not sitting down quick enough, this was mentioned on the departure message as the reason for the delay, and 2 days later she received a written warning through her letter box telling her to improve on her performance - and it was a similar situation re families being separated.

Also, out of interest, FR do not carry "unaccompanied" children, so what if you have a 5 year old sitting 10 rows away from their parent and nobody is willing to swap? Are they "unaccompanied"?

I do like the FR business model generally, but to believe that any of their "improvements" lead to lower fares is quite simply naive.

XSB

I think that it is actually unsafe for small children to sit away from their parents.

Just think about it: who is going to check that they are safely strapped in?

If a catastrophe happens, what if nobody is willing to help them get out of the aircraft? A parent is usually willing to die to save their own child but may not be as keen to put themselves at risk for someone else's

There are good reasons why a parent needs to sit with their own children when they are under a certain age - say 10/12. I think that is a health and safety issue and that making them pay (in other words putting a tax/premium on travelling with small children) is just wrong. (But then, so is charging people for wheelchairs and they have done that. :( )

When my kids were small I would have just refused to sit down if I had not been able to sit with them (or at least have one with me and one with their dad). When I was cabin crew, I always managed to sort it out for people - it is really important!!!!! :)

As a father with a 2 yr old daughter, I have travelled with Ryanir many times, however after reading that, never again!

Charging families to be pre-boarded is just crazy, they shouldn't be allowed to do it.

:= :=

Selecting Devil's Advocate Mode
Why should they not be allowed and who should not allow them?
Simply because families have extended this privilege to families and elderly people, why should everyone have to continue with it?

Why should families be able to bag nice seats? I am not disputing the benefits of them sitting together, in which case they can ensure that they get to the top of the check-in queue.

Families get many, many privileges that others do not get.

ok, what's next? Coin locks on the lavs? Can't wait what will that honourable gentleman surprise us with next time :rolleyes:

It's just stupid that a family with little kids MUST pay to be pre-boared.

As mentioned above, it wouldn't surprise me if they start charging passengers to have a p#ss. :* :*

That's the FR model J41/42. You want your family to sit together? fine. You pay for it. I'm with PAXboy on this one, why SHOULD families be exempt?

Am I willing to toss a euro or three to get on before hordes? Depends on the flights.

Do start travelling with extra euro coins on future FR flights because, "in the event of a loss of pressurization in the cabin, an oxygen mask will drop from the overhead area. Place the elastic band around your head and cover your nose and mouth with the mask. Please be sure to secure your own mask before assisting others. Once your mask is secure, please insert a one euro coin into the slot in the arm rest for 10 minutes of oxygen. A red light will flash when you have about 30 seconds of air remaining. Do not panic, insert one euro for another 10 minutes of air."

:) :) :) :)

If only I believed you. If we were to assume that everyone that has made this statement has followed through with it, I'd have to say that it's a fairly impressive performance by Ryanair to be targeting a total passenger figure of 42m this year!:ok:

I think it would probably surprise me but at the same time, why not? All Ryanair have ever done is itemised their pricing structure and have continued to develop this over time. In a significant majority of cases, summing the various components still results in a value-for-money fare. Surely that's all you can want and expect from a low cost carrier. I really don't understand how people that see a seat advertised for 1cent can genuinely expect to pay that for the whole service. It's not as if you aren't presented with the final total before you commit to anything!

You want your family to sit together? fine. You pay for it. I'm with PAXboy on this one, why SHOULD families be exempt?

Because "It is probable that family group members would seek each other out should an emergency evacuation be required, an action that could adversely affect the rapid evacuation of the aircraft. Children should be seated where they can be adequately supervised by an accompanying adult in the event of turbulence or a decompression in the cabin."

That's why, its a safety matter as far as the CAA are concerned.

Quote from the CAA, here is the citation http://www.caa.co.uk/default.aspx?ca...90&pageid=1344

Well, at the risk of getting a severe reprimand from the Moderator, I think some of you are right little ar$eholes to suggest that people travelling with children shouldn't get free priority boarding. Shame shame shame on you! Are you the same people that occupy seats on the bus whilst senior citizens or mothers with infants are left standing? The major issue of children being with their parents is, as mentioned above, one of SAFETY. I remember how worried I was (in the event of an emergency) when some years ago my then young children, my wife and I were all split up on a completely full DC-10 oceanic flight. Lighten up people!

I don't think anyone is suggesting that families with children should have 'nicer' seats than anyone else. In fact, I think this should definitely not happen. I agree that people with small children already get enough privilieges - special parking spaces are a prime example of unnecessary pampering IMVHO.

The fact remains though that it is a big safety issue as small children need supervision to ensure their behaviour is safe (fastened seat belts, sitting down during take-off/turbulence, etc) and MOST importantly, they would need help during an emergency and the person who wants (and would fight) to help them, is obviously their parent/s.

As I said before, I would have refused point blank to travel separately from my children when they were young - I am a very quiet and polite passenger normally but when it comes to the safety of my kids I would kick up a big fuss. Sorry to all you people without children but that is how it is and it is totally right! ;)

Priority boarding is fine only when airport gate rooms are designed to help reduce the scrum of pax waiting to board and the ground staff can manage the scrum boarding process effectively. I can think of at least one airport where priority boarding at some gates would never work because of these two factors.