Data: 2002-11-04 07:40:30
Temat: o Ryanair - nie tak rozowo...
Nadawca:

Witam Super-trampow
Poczytajcie prosze co pisza Brytyjczycy o super-taniej linii lotniczej
i... udanego tygodnia!
Wojtek Dabrowski
===================
You are welcome to visit my web travel pages:
wdabr.gdansk.tpsa.pl/


It may be cheap (but not always), but it certainly isn't clever. And it
definitely isn't funny! Flying Ryanair is not the fantastic low cost and
cheerful option that it is made out to be. First, the low cost airlines
(Ryanair, Buzz, and Easyjet/Go) have made London Stansted their main hub.

Stansted is a major pain to get to and from as it is situated some 68km
north of Central London and the principal way, to get there using public
transport, is on the Stansted Express from Liverpool St in Central London.
A
return ticket from Liverpool St in central London costs ?23 - not cheap for
the 50 minute journey each way. If you arrive back into Stansted after
midnight, the chances are that you will have missed the last train, because
they do not always wait for the last flight, so the alternative to travel
back to London is by expensive taxi - we are talking ?60+ (or $100+). Now
that the Stansted Express no longer runs on Sundays due to rail works, you
have to take a painfully long coach journey that takes around 2 hours.

Secondly, one of the particularly unendearing habits practiced by BAA
(British Airports Authority) at Stansted is to be selective as to which
flights they decide to put up on the flight information screens. This lack
of info seems to apply particularly to Ryanair flights. This means that you
could be sitting waiting in the check in area for your flight check in
information to appear on screen and it never does. A weary frequent Ryanair
traveller warned the Beetle that this happens frequently, so a lesson
learned is to occasionally prowl around the airport to check that your
flight hasn't already started checking in. This happened to the Beetle
going
to Trieste, resulting in a late check in, only 15 minutes before the gate
closed, reducing the amount of time available for foraging for duty free
chocolate (and other Beetle fodder) to a minimum!

Thirdly, Ryanair do not give you a boarding pass with a printed seat
number - it is free seating. What a nightmare, all those people with their
sharp elbows. Dignified British queuing (um, no!) turns out in reality as a
training opportunity for a rugby scrum! Is it really too much trouble to
put
seat numbers on a ticket?

Once you have wrestled your way on board, you may think about reading
material to while away the excessive amount of time spent on the runway
awaiting clearance to depart. You'd be disappointed. There is no reading
material whatsoever; no free newspapers or magazines to read. The staff do
hand out a brochure with pictures of perfumes and silly Ryan Air models (as
if!!) and then when you approach landing, you are requested to hand them
back again! (There really isn't anything worth reading in them anyway all,
unless you like looking at pictures of grey coloured pearl necklaces.)
Buzz,
by contrast have excellent info brochures with information about your
destination, what to see, where to go, recommendations on where to eat, day
trips away etc.

Fifthly, forget on-board entertainment or headphones, music or films - the
only entertainment to be had is to observe the no frills service you are
paying for, for example, watching the faces of the uninitiated when they
are
asked to pay ?4 ($6) for a sandwich, and ?1.50 ($2) for a small and nasty
coffee. For her trip to Oslo, the Beetle took a flask of coffee, much to
the
envy of fellow passengers and the annoyance of the air crew. (Buzz do the
best and very drinkable coffee if you have a choice! Also recommended by
our
Webmaster!)

Even for someone of limited height, (5'2"), the seats are cripplingly
unrealistically tiny with next to no leg room. Even the Beetle's knees
touched the seat in front.

Sixthly, presumably also to cut costs, passengers are responsible for
cleaning; whilst I agree with our webmaster that passengers should be tidy
and take their rubbish away with them at the end of their journey, the
Ryanair way is to have 2 "hostesses" walk down the aisle with a big bin
liner open. You are required to lean over your fellow passengers and throw
your rubbish in the bin liner as they walk by. Talk about target practice.
It is one of my nightmares that one day, someone will actually use the sick
bag provided (the only object to be found on your seat pocket) and be too
embarrassed to try and throw it into this walking bin bag, so they'll leave
it for me to find, whilst thinking oh, that's strange there actually is
something in my seat pocket, I wonder what it is!

Seventh: the staff. My theory is that people who work for Ryanair failed to
pass the Aeroflot entrance exams. Rudeness, ability to glare and make
unnecessarily snotty remarks are all prerequisites for hiring. As for the
pilots, flying Ryanair for them must be their first job out of pilot
school.
The Beetle has never, ever had a smooth two tyred landing on the handful of
flights she has been with them.

But my biggest complaint about Ryanair: it's not just the poor service,
which is abominable, it's not the supercilious staff, the lack of decent
coffee or seat numbers, it's the fact that to cut costs, they often do not
fly into the main airport in a city - and they don't even warn you about it
on booking! The Beetle finds this practice offensively misleading. For
example, if you want to fly to Copenhagen in Denmark, you actually arrive
into Sweden and have to take a bus journey back into Denmark.

The Beetle recently flew Ryanair to Oslo. It was only after she had booked
the tickets when she investigated how to get from the airport to the centre
of Oslo, that she realised that Torp airport, where Ryanair fly into is
100km away from Oslo. At no time was this made clear when booking on-line,
even though the booking was for Oslo. Had this been made abundantly clear,
the Beetle would have gone elsewhere.

Not only is it 100 km away from Oslo, but there is no public transport
after
8pm to Oslo from Torp (and even then, it is a very expensive taxi ride to
the train station) as Torp is a very small sleepy little town. The Ryanair
dedicated coach cost around ?20 or $30 return and took 2 miserable hours so
that a 7.25pm Stansted departure resulted in the Beetle arriving at her
Oslo
city centre hotel at almost 1am - and it is a 1 ? hr flight and a one hour
time difference. Do the math, as they say! The real airport in Oslo, where
all of the other carriers fly into has excellent transport connections and
takes less than half an hour from Oslo city centre by train. Never again!