Like many Americans, I’m researching a summer trip to Europe and I’m following my own advice to not only price out all different modes of transportation, but to look up baggage and other fees that may be charged.
In my travel guide, 17 ways to find the cheapest flights, I advised: “Stay away from low-cost carriers … When you do a flight search, don’t just grab the cheapest fare you see, especially from a low-cost carrier (LCC) because it could end up costing you much more than you think.”
This couldn’t be more true for European budget carriers. I just learned that Ryanair, founded in 1984 in Ireland and one of Europe’s largest low-fare carriers, charges a whopping £55 ($68 USD) just to print a boarding pass at the airport. That’s per passenger!
Here’s their policy directly from their website: “What happens if I do not check in online? If you do not check in online up to 2 hours before your scheduled departure time, you may check in at the airport up to 40 minutes before departure, but you will be charged an airport check-in fee. See our Table of Fees. We urge all passengers to check in online before arriving at the airport so these fees can be avoided.” When you click the fees link, this comes up: “Airport check-in fee €/£55 (for flights from Spain €/£ 30) The fee is charged per passenger per sector.”
The fee has been around since December 2019 and if you do a quick search online, you can find many examples of unhappy travelers getting slapped with it, including this one I found on Reddit: “I got hit with a $300 fee for 6 passengers after I couldn’t check in online. I wrote to customer service and they were useless.”
Ryanair is in the news today because they plan to ditch paper boarding passes in favor of digital ones by summer. According to the Mirror: “The budget airline previously announced that it will phase out paper boarding passes and check-in desks entirely by the end of 2025. The change would make Ryanair the first airline in the world to go entirely paperless. Instead, travellers will need to present a digital PDF version of their boarding pass via the Ryanair app.”
I do think this is the future and Michael O’Leary, the airline’s CEO, said at a press conference in October: “We are working towards May 1 that everything will be done on the app, nothing will be done on paper anymore.”
Although, O’Leary still uses paper tickets himself, he told the Mirror, “that by scrapping check-in desks and physical boarding passes, passengers will never have to pay for their ticket to be printed at the airport again.”
That’s obvious but travelers need to know this in advance, which is why everyone booking tickets needs to read the fine print and their emails from the airlines carefully, especially those booking tickets for elderly loved ones. As one person pointed out in the article: “Some older persons may have a smart phone, but that doesn’t mean that they know how to use them fully. Basics – yes but not much more.”
KEEP READING
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–The travel gadget flight attendants never leave home without
–Going on a cruise? Be sure to bring this
–The genius phone hack to try when your plane doesn’t have an in-flight entertainment system
–Travel hack: How to use your wireless headphones to watch in-flight movies
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