Ryanair – when every page is a dark pattern

This website doesn't even touch on the worst dark patterns. Ryanair will e-mail you and complain that you booked using a travel agent (like trip.com). Well yes, Ryanair itself put their flights on Amadeus! If you only want people to book directly using your site, then make a business decision to lose the outside business and don't complain to your customer like a toddler.

They then charge you to use an app to scan your ID, some ridiculously low amount like 60 cents. The transactions costs and the software maintenance on this integration must dwarf the actual revenue generated. But you need to do this for reasons, one of which apparently is that not doing it will add an even higher fee. This is nickel and diming by instinct rather than out of any rational thinking.

One side effect of all of these tacked-on fees and dark patterns is that the supposed perks lose any meaning. Everyone ends up paying for 'speedy boarding', so that the 'speedy boarding' actually takes longer than the people who board last. And even the 'speedy boarding' passengers won't be able to fit their bags on board.

I actively avoid (and told my SO to never book) Ryanair. None of the other low cost airlines are this bad. Literally Easyjet are easier to deal with. Easyjet also have dark patterns (literally, always look for the grey text..) but they don't go out of their way to make you suffer.

Also, how degrading is it for flight attendents to have to go around selling scratch cards? I'm sure Ryanair would have them go around selling fentanyl if it were up to corporate.

Ryanair is not an airline. It is a byzantine bureaucratic game that rewards successful completion with a cheap airline ticket.

I recall a pattern they used to use, probably illegal, when paying for a flight quoted in a foreign currency. Ryanair would "helpfully" offer for you to pay in your own currency with their awful exchange rate, with the option to instead pay in the advertised foreign currency (thus making use of your credit card's exchange rate - typically the market rate) on a pop-up only visible if you click the tiny "more information" link made to look like terms and conditions. The opt-out was not even on the same page, invisible to anyone but those most alert to these tricks. That probably netted them a good 10% extra margin on 95% of sales through deception. Disgraceful behaviour.

Ryanair are what they are. The reason every flight is so cheap in Europe is because of them. They've never pretended to be anything else other than a budget airline where any extras or conveniences will cost you extra. I've literally just checked in with an EasyJet flight and it's exactly the same patterns everywhere. Every other airline copied RyanAir because most passengers are highly price sensitive. The problem is that they're still not as cheap.

The 'not printing a boarding ticket' before you travel and being charged for it at the airport has been around since 2009: https://theguardian.com/money/2009/may/14/ryanair-online-che... so it's hard for people to feign ignorance of it.

I use "Ryanair check-in experience" to describe naggy interfaces because everyone understands exactly what it means. With my last easyJet flight, I counted the number of times I had to say "no" before I could get the ticket I wanted at the price I was given. It was something like a dozen.

The internet feels like that. Our devices feel like that. Everything feels like that. It's as if the entire world is turning into a Marrakech bazaar with aggressive kiosk owners. We normalised treating users like marks for aggressive sales tactics.

As a teenager I worked at a box store, and I had to keep pushing extended warranties on threat of creative dismissal. I saw how disingenuous pitches changed the relationship with customers from trust-based to adversarial. If this upsell is bullshit, how trustworthy is the actual service?

When I went freelance, I practiced radical honesty, and it worked great. Once people accept that you're honest and on their side, they'll sign blank cheques. Trust is incredibly valuable in an increasingly trustless society.

yandex? Are Yandex employees free to travel around Europe? Interesting.

This is like a very regressive tax policy. If you are high capability individual, you will sail through these screens and avoid adding extra charges, if you are a ... low capability individual, you won't be able to do that, and you end up subsidising the travel of those smarter than you.

Meanwhile: the Ryanair app actually works, unlike many others.

EasyJet App is slop, the BA app is total shite.

I don't use Ryanair specifically but these patterns are commonly found on all other discount airlines, and even some regular airlines as well.

One particularily devious example is when you log into WizzAir's website, the check box under the login (which takes your email and password) is not "Remember me", but rather "Subscribe me to marketing emails".

Always takes me a moment not to select it.

I always wonder about the people that implement this.

They surely know what they're doing, so, do they literally have meetings openly discussing where to put buttons to trick people? Am I just naive in thinking that's insane?

I once bought the "fast track" option mentioned in the article for a Ryanair flight. The airport did not have fast track. When I asked for a refund, customer service told me that "it is the customer's responsibility to ensure that fast track is available at the airport they are flying from before purchasing".

Speaking of dark pattern, I recently resigned my dropbox sub and they have one of the most user hostile flow I've seen in quite a while, at least on a "legitimate" website. Given that they aim mostly for business and big business now, keeping this thing clearly meant to scare or confuse Random Joe felt very surprising to me.

I'm sure they have lots of numbers showing it's worth it, but I can't help notice that companies who know they are good and you need them tend to have a much easier unsub path, frictionless for many. It doesn't inspire huge confidence and very much confirmed my wish to unsubscribe.

Here’s the “table of fees”: https://www.ryanair.com/us/en/useful-info/help-centre/fees

One interesting ones that I was curious about ua the “infant fee”. Though I can’t see what exactly that is for.

Is that only if you want to put the infant in the overhead bin?

Are there any examples of white hat hackers or similar fighting against stuff like this? Too much cyber harm is done to benign businesses and people already, so I wonder if there's ever some "for a good cause".

Pro tip: if you want a nice seat on a Ryanair flight, wait with the check-in until shortly before the deadline. Their 'random' seat assignment algorithm gives out the 'bad' seats first, in the hopes of being able to sell the 'better' ones. Only works if the flight is fully booked of course.

This screenshot is a real eye opener: https://hallofshame.design/content/images/size/w1000/2022/07...

So, if you want a check-in bag, you pay almost 50% more than the "value" price, and if you want the same level of service as with "legacy" airlines (except "fast track through security"), you pay almost double?

Ultimately, I think the answer to this kind of customer abuse is for customers to avoid companies that do this, but as far as I know, all the airlines attempt to trick their customers.

Tip: Decline when they first prompt you about choosing luggage options. They will ask again later in the booking flow, and it will be cheaper. I only ever book cabin luggage with Ryanair and it worked every single time so far.

Ryanair is stupidly cheap. They probably don't make any money on the basic flight.

They do something very pernicious when displaying the price of extra options for return flights.

Instead of showing you the total price for the return flight, they show you the price of the option on the cheapest leg of the flight. So for example, if an option cost $10 on the outbound flight, $15 inbound flight, instead of displaying $25 total or $12.5 on average, they display "From $10 per flight". You'd expect to pay $20 but end up paying $25.

Funnily enough the buses/taxis/trains page in the checkout does actually hold a brilliant deal. You can get a National Express coach return to/from Stansted for about half the price that they sell it for on their own website, and it's needed too because Stansted Express trains are a ridiculously expensive monopoly.

Unfortunately Ryanair left Frankfurt Airport. They consistently offered flights an order of magnitude cheaper than other airlines and I could reach Frankfurt airport directly by bus for free with my student ticket. This was the ideal way to go on vacation for me. I don't mind clicking "no thanks" a few times when it saves me 500 euros.

On the plus side if you are good at navigating the patterns Ryanair can be very cheap and the flights usually get you from A to B reasonably efficiently and on time.

I've used them loads of times and it's usually fine. Occasionally I get stung by something and extra charges like not checking in on time or misreading the baggage regs. Or changing my return date which is not really a dark pattern but often expensive. (sort of a dark pattern - the flights can be like £10 if you book ahead but if you need to delay your flight a day at the last minute you'll find they've gone to £200)

I swear it's only getting worse everywhere.

Ryanair is a great example of the ideology starting in the 1990s that individuals would want to spend every waking moment optimizing the most mundane purchases to save a fraction of a penny.

I hope we will soon get over this nonsense and enjoy a shared understanding that people are terrible at making decisions.

I'm not expecting the UX designers to lead the way here. Education perhaps? Better role models?

I feel like this is the first time the author has booked a flight. These patterns are everywhere from car rental agencies to flights to hotel bookings.

I hate dark patterns like everybody else, but I have to say that - despite those - the Ryanair website still seems to me one of the best ones for booking a flight.

It might be because I got accustomed to it, but - while you indeed need to decline extra after extra - the overall process seems sufficiently clear and straightforward, and most of all both the website and the app are quick and bug-free (in my experience).

Other airline websites I've used in comparison are much much worse. Finnair, SAS, Swiss (Lufthansa), EasyJet, AirBaltic, LOT... much slower, clunkier, and buggier. (Again, in my experience.)

As for the actual experience of flying with them, of course it's not luxurious, and you need to accept that strictly enforcing their rules is how they can keep their prices down. So I'll go against the grain and say that I have no sympathy for the people that show up at the gate with two oversized bags and make a scene because they're asked to pay for them.

Interesting thread, with half of the complaints different from my experience. But I also put my bag in the overhead without paying for anything but the most basic ticket, so who knows.

Funny dark pattern that I found: When checking in on the app, they have copy&paste disabled. Hence, I need to enter booking code and email address manually. I next expect them to make the booking code longer (its only 6 characters), or reset when leaving the app, so that even more people fail at this task.

Recently I booked a ticket on Ryanair. To validate my account I had to turn on my camera, hold my ID card, then do a bunch of things the machine asked me, like spin my head to the left, etc. Next-level reverse-Turing test there. It really felt like my computer-master was making fun of me by giving me silly instructions. Computers were a mistake, I guess.

This is why we need stronger consumer watchdog groups that can combat this kind of behavior by the corpos.

Is it bad that all these patterns seem pretty normal to me?

Though I think that last one was pretty ingenious — when they listed the price of the cheapest option as $78.76 but compared it to the markup of the other pricier options as $28.21, $37.81 etc.

Is this site generated by ai? Repeating the same words and making zero points

Frontier airlines literally wouldn't let me check in to my flight back without paying 25$, I would just get a loading bar if I didn't select a seat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIw5WlBZ-ds

I tried every trick in the book, but in the end only dev console could save the day. It was a null reference exception on not buying a bundle...

At least it's still possible to book over website. Wizzair disabled searching and booking over web browser with permanent "System maintenance". You're forced to use their mobile app, and always update the app to the latest version, and of course today their app shat itself.

This is after all the airline which inspired following musical number: https://youtu.be/FLoHL2O04aI?si=eNqNBRrbSQ_INQYy

Reminds me of how Aeroflot, the Russian national airline, would sneak an insurance into your booking at the very last step, even if you skip right past all the additional steps (hotels, car rental, other bullshit) in the sidebar. They would "accidentally" add it to your order and you have to actively click "remove" to not throw several hundred rubles away. It's almost like they know that no person in their right mind would buy their "insurance for the duration of flight" so they have to push it like that because someone worked hard for that partnership.

I have to say having used Ryanair a couple of times in the last year - it’s not all that bad. In fact I’d say the booking experience and UX of the site is a lot better than many of their competitors.

As long as you pay attention and read the information given to you - and check in via the app - then it’s smooth sailing. The flights (on my route) are so cheap, that upgrading everything (best seats, priority boarding, fast track etc) is still about a third of the price sometimes of flying with other operators without any hand luggage.

I think that the customers who regularly fly low cost airlines understand the game being played here.

In the US we have the same situation with Spirit and Frontier.

If you’re well-informed you can fly for an incredibly low price on low cost airlines.

These low cost airlines punish customers who cost the airline in their biggest costs like labor and fuel. And, yes, they upsell on unnecessary upgrades.

One person’s dark pattern is another person’s opportunity to save.

I once met a guy on a Spirit flight who was taking his first flight ever to visit family where he’d normally drive an incredibly long distance to get there, but because the flight was so affordable he could cut his travel time. I don’t think he cared that the website had dark patterns because he couldn’t fly on a traditional airline as it was cost-prohibitive.

My major complaints are different:

- their country selector fails if it's not already set to the correct country. It is totally broken, as you might select something, and the result is another, or none at all. So sometimes it doesn't change the selection, at all, not until you've selected another random country first, after that it suddenly does respond to the needed country. This is enough to sometimes just give up.

But in fairness I always blame the folks from this site, and the sorry state of our profession! That's you folks, who have been corrupted to work for the highest bidder only, and never take out the trash! So we stand on an ever increasing pile of trash. Because as a collective we waste our time building, for example, linux, while it is an anachronistic piece of software, irrelevant. Shitware. We are quite autistic, as we place ourselves outside of society. We act like victims instead of citizens that work and wish for their environment to improve. Inevitably it doesn't appreciate us. It pushes the imposter syndrome.

- The seat becomes very uncomfortable over time. It seems the foam has degraded and lost its elasticity due to overuse. Bone on metal.

- There is no head rest for people that are above the median. So you see many, many people just giving up and resting their head on the seat in front of them.

But I like certain other things: no magazines, no security leaflets, no mess, the no nonsense execution.

The website is something I can solve myself, as they have not started to randomize the answers and the colors yet ;-)

All airlines have the same problems: the security theater, the over-crowding, the waiting, the air conditioning, the on-boarding, the lack of liquidity of the tickets (please let me sell the ticket or swap it). It's crap and Ryanair does at least as well as others. In fact I may even prefer dark patterns when the site works well otherwise.

Yes. I stopped flying RA after a problematic experience booking.

I find all airline bookings never work first time - usually three, four or five attempts are required.

RA bury deeply the option for automatic currency conversion at their extremely high rates, which is active by default.

On a third or so attempt to book, I managed to miss turning that off, and was accordingly ripped off, despite my explicit wish not for it happen.

If a company is actively, knowingly and willingly harming you, it's time to walk away.

Ryanair is a prime example of a company that employs various manipulative techniques, known as "dark patterns," to increase its profits.

You can say "to increase its profits" about anything a company does. The problem with using dark patterns isn't the profit motive. The problem is it's coercing people through deception.

I just flew aer lingus and ryanair and both charged you to pick seats - but we didn't pay. Both flights were almost empty. Aer lingus algorithm gave our party an empty row each. Ryanair algorithim put us sitting next to strangers, surrounded by empty rows/seats.

You certainly can’t be booking a flight through their site with your guard down.

The only positive of their site is that it actually works. I am always shocked that so many airline sites globally break, making it difficult to give them your money

I agree 100%.

The first time I used it, I paid in the airport for the boarding pass. When I complained that I never paid for in other airline companies, I was told I did not have to pay for it if I read the email they sent me to print it 2 hours in advance.

But I received tons of emails from Ryanair every week before the flight. Advertisement emails which, at some point, I got tired of and stopped reading them: that's how I missed the email in which they asked me to print the boarding pass.

Not to mention that the paragraph in which they mentioned the boarding pass was itself a small portion of a larger advertisement email I still keep in my email inbox.

The best of Ryanair dark patterns, that is now gone, was on the travel insurance. They forced you to select your country as if insurance was mandatory but you had to go and find the "No insurance" country so you could continue without insurance.

Just yesterday:

Collection of Dark Patterns and Unethical Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40993389 - Jul 2024 (70 comments)

When dealing with Ryanair you just have to consider them hostile and duplicitous and set your expectations accordingly in advance.

I got so angry with Ryanair's website experience that I'm now routinely paying >100% premium with other airlines to avoid having to deal with it. Off the top of my head:

- They make it sound as if you _have_ to choose a seat (and pay for that choice), to avoid this you must find a tiny text link (not button) somewhere hidden on the page

- All the worst/most expensive options pre-selected for you

- Randomly changing the saliency of the options that give you choice between premium (additional fee) choices and free choices; so that you'll almost certainly accidentally include an add-on you didn't want

- Dynamic pricing that changes depending on whether you've seen the page before etc.

- Ridiculous baggage policies/completely opaque costs for additional luggage depending on where and when you decide to add it to your booking

- At the checkout page, the currency/payment UI is so broken that I regularly had to go into browser devtools and send requests by hand just so I could complete a booking. Also currency exchange scam.

- Clicking on "search" (or was it "book"?) automatically accepts their shitty terms and conditions for you even if you don't click on the checkbox, which is probably illegal

I'm sure there were much more.

The funny thing is I think they’d have more business if they just made it one (temporarily reversible) click.

Ryanair ... just recently I went with my 3 kids with them. I did a mistake in paying an adult ticket for my oldest son instead of teenager ticket. This small mistake made it impossible to do the checkin online. It was impossible to correct this mistake online, they referred to customer support which I was not able to reach at all despite many attempts. So I decided to do the checkin at the airport instead. After waiting around 30 minutes in the line I explained them why I was not able to do the checkin online. They then spent 25 MINUTES trying to solve the mistake, she had to make 3 phone calls and get help from her manager to try to change the ticket from adult to teenager. Of course I had to pay €30 per person for doing the checkin at the counter instead of online. I made it in time but the line at the checkin grew a lot as everyone was waiting to solve the issue. So stupid.

It's pretty sad that there are developers willing to work on crap like this. Ethics much?

I think it's related to the business culture in Ireland. Interacting with local businesses here, they don't seem to have any problems with ripping you off. Irish people don't complain enough. Also there's no enforcement of the law. Ryanair gets brought to account by the British CAA (civil aviation authority) now and again because of it's dodgy practices never by the Irish one. Government has told it's regulators to have a soft touch on businesses so that the country is attractive to foreign companies.