Avoid Paying Too Much on Ryanair Flights
Here’s our step-by-step booking guide to making Ryanair live up to its low-fares promise:
Work out how to avoid the add-on charges that Ryanair famously charges. If you’ve ever booked a flight at Ryanair.com, you’ll know it’s a minefield of fees and extras that extract money from you at every turn.
Ryanair is a minefield of fees and extras that extract money from you at every turn
That’s how the company makes its money, and how that £6 flight can end up costing far more than you had hoped. But it can be beaten. Here’s a guide to making Ryanair live up to its low-fares promise when booking low cost flights:
1. Ignore Ryanair “seat sales”
Ryanair has seat sales like DFS has sofa sales: very, very frequently. And they’re not always a steal. Usually the cheapest seats go to the earliest bookers. So just book as far ahead as you can.
2. Take the hit
Once you’ve chosen your flight, the first add-on is a £5 check-in fee. A travesty, but there’s no way around it, I’m afraid, so we have to let them have that. Everything else, though, we can beat.
3. Watch the boxes
- On the next window, fill in passenger names (carefully — a change is £100),
- select “0 bags” (of course) and “no” on priority boarding (not worth it).
- Now the site asks you to “select a country of residence” for insurance. You don’t want insurance. To avoid paying, click the window and scroll down — you’ll find “no travel insurance required” hidden away, unbelievably, between Latvia and Lithuania. Fiendish.
- Click “no” to everything else on this page, and move on.
4. Beat the card fee on bookings
Next is Ryanair’s meanest extra of all, the card payment fee. It’s £5 per flight — £40 for a family of four return. The only way to avoid it is using Mastercard Prepaid, which normally comes with all manner of hefty charges and monthly fees. Unless, that is, you get it for free. Go to compareprepaid.co.uk; click on “Free prepaid credit cards” and choose the Fairfx card; click through to its site and apply for a Eurocard Mastercard — which you can have for nothing.
You’re done — and you haven’t paid Ryanair a penny more than you had to. Passengers 1, Ryanair 0. Now all you have to do is travel on Ryanair.
I wanted to include a link to the Ryanair charity calender - link to empty page however this page is blank
