Passengers Pay for Incompetent Web Design

originally published on Countries Beginning with I, May 30, 2007 (with new addendum here)

I hope Ryanair’s web designers get big bonuses this year: they are helping the company rake in money it doesn’t deserve. And there’s nothing for a frustrated passenger to do but bend over and take it.

I just booked a flight for my daughter and myself to fly from Italy (where we live) to visit my father in the UK (where he lives) before he has major surgery in June. Upon arriving at the payment screen (for two passengers) I get the following options:

If I wish to travel without checking in baggage, I must choose Online Checkin/Priority Boarding, which has a cost of 6 euros. I can’t leave the selector on “How many bags to Check in?” - that results in an error.

I can’t actually use the online check-in service because (a) two of us are travelling together, one of whom needs to check a bag and (b):

At this point in the purchase process, the application KNOWS that I am travellng from Italy to the UK, so why is it offering - forcing! - a service which it knows I cannot use?

Notice the NB at the bottom of the screenshot above. Yeah, like hell. I have rarely seen Ryanair staff in Bergamo offer priority boarding even to people who need it (”passengers needing assistance or travelling with small children”). The fact that priority boarding is specifically excluded for Italy acknowledges this. So I have in effect paid a six-euro tax for Ryanair’s poor web design.

Furthermore, there is no way to speak with anyone at Ryanair except via a reservations center which costs €1.50 a minute to speak to (or, more likely, hold for).

If Ryanair needs that badly to make more money, they should just charge me more for the flight. This kind of crap makes them look incompetent in web design, which in turn leads the customer to wonder how much they can be trusted with the bigger stuff, such as security of credit card data - not good for a company that lives through online bookings. And/or it leads me to suspect that they have found a dishonest new way to make their fares look lower when in fact they cannot afford to fly me without that extra 6 euros. Which is another form of false advertising.

Addendum, June 26 - When we checked in for the return flight from Luton last night, the lady told us we had one priority check-in paid for and could purchase another at the desk “over there.” This reminded me of the above website irritation so I said: “As a matter of fact, I didn’t want that priority check-in and couldn’t use it from Italy, but your website is messed up and forced me to buy it.”

“Some other people have said that,” she replied. So… Ryanair desk staff are well aware of this problem. But either none of them have tried to communicate it to corporate HQ, or HQ doesn’t care (or likes things the way they are - they make more money). This was a red flag to a bull (me). The lady’s apparent indifference to the matter didn’t help.

“Maybe someone should be told to fix it,” I said. “There’s no webmaster address anywhere on the site, so I couldn’t reach anyone to complain about it.”

Then she got defensive and snotty: “Well, obviously a lot of people manage to figure it out.”

Ross was, as usual, squirming with embarrassment at her mother’s obsession with making things better (and pissing people off), so I left the counter, grumbling, rather than get into a fight with the lady (had one with Ross instead).

But, really… I don’t pay to be smart-mouthed by someone who’s supposed to serve me, and, while my friend Sara told me that she did manage to book on Ryanair without paying for luggage or priority boarding, if the feat is so difficult that I, with 25 years’ experience online couldn’t figure it out in a good 15 minutes of trying, well, we have a usability problem, don’t we?

Solution: Anyone know how to reach someone who has influence on web design at Ryanair.com?