Ryanair

Flying Ryanair is just getting to be a joke. I've ranted about them till I'm sick ranting about them - about their fees x 7 for using credit/debit cards, the fact fact they abandoned their old policy of letting babies and disabled people pre-board, their nonsense about checking in on-line or fining people £60 each - I don't tend to lug a printer about in my rucksack when I am camping, personally - give me the choice guys! Anyway today's rant is about luggage.


Last summer was bad enough - Thomas's hand luggage going out to Pisa weighed 10.2kg, Anna's weighed 6kg - they held up a queue of 100 people while they moved two newspapers from Thomas's case to Anna's. I can fully understand them chucking out his newspapers if he had been alone - they are petty like that, but when he was carrying both cases - that is just jobsworthing to the nth degree.


So last week we flew to Paris. Unwilling to pay the 120-odd quid surcharge to take a couple of hold cases, we went for the crazy option seven small suitcases as you are allowed to carry them on board yourself free of charge. Funnily enough, the other 182 passengers on board had had the same idea - ho hum. So we all struggled up the stairs with our 189 small cases and fought for locker space to store them (having all had them size and weight-checked at the departure gate.) On arrival at Beauvais, only three cases came off on the carousel for that full flight, so they literally flew with a full plane and an empty hold. We then struggled across Paris  on Sunday - a toddler, two small kids, two big ones, two adults, seven cases, a buggy and a rucksack - on foot for the first half mile, then bus, regional train (RER), metro (up and down stairs, stairs and more stairs and it was during the Paris Marathon so we were knee-deep in runners who'd just completed the course), bus and then foot to the Ryanair plane at Beauvais - paying in total something like 150 Euros to get out into the middle of nowhere to their stupid airport. Next time, it'll be a sensible airline into CDG - Ryanair - you've pissed me off one last time - whenever there is an alternative in the future, Ryanair will be ruled out.


(Oh and my prediction for Ryanair in the future - given the 737-800 has a capacity of 189 passengers and on other airlines they can each take 20kg of hold luggage - I reckon by next summer Ryanair will have bumped hold luggage up to £100 each to put people off taking cases completely and will have installed around 48 seats in the hold itself for passengers willing to travel without windows!) ;-)