For reasons that will come apparent later on this year, I’ll be going to Portugal.
At the moment, I’m working on the trip design at the moment – but I’ve chosen to have a little fun with the trip. And yes – that means flying Ryanair.
Mobile booking can be hit and miss (and let’s face it, the optimisation of a lot of booking engines can lead it to a miss)
Does Ryanair shine in this respect?
For this trip, I’m going between Porto and Birmingham on a one-way ticket.
Let’s load up the app and see what happens
Hello darkness my old friend…
With the app loaded, there’s a few options. For clarity – I’ve pre-registered (which adds a few minutes extra if you haven’t done before)
Buy stuff. Go on… Go on….
I’ve tapped search for flights – giving a simple search dialogue
So there’s some GPS going on in the background as it picks my closest airport. Useful – but not today. Thankfully, the date-check tool is pretty simple for this route.
So wit the date selected, let’s see what offerings Ryanair are making between Porto and Birmingham
So €43ish up. Not too bad for the segment length and convenience.
Now – let the up-sell begin. I’ve chosen the cheapest fare (because… well – it’s me), and it’s time for the first up-sell – upgrade to plus!
Nah…
So let’s look at the offering:
- 60 day check-in window I can live without.
- I am travelling light this trip – so no hold luggage for me.
- Priority boarding and seat would be nice though.
The next step is to enter the passenger details. As the App know who I am, that’s just another tap on my name and that’s done and dusted.
That done – let’s go for more up-sells!
Well €8 or so for baggage and a seat. I can live with that.
Again, every seat has a different price. I just want a cheap window seat near the back of the plane (and as Ryanair board from both the back and front – this is no bad thing)
I paid €2.50 – you can pay a lot more if you want. I didn’t. And I wanted a window seat. The rest is gloss.
Helpfully, the next up-sell kicked in as the airline offers priority boarding. If you’re wanting to take your big trolley bag and a little laptop bag on the plane with you (without having the bigger bag go in the hold), this is pretty much a requirement. You can thank the airline for changing its luggage policy.
Well – I wanted it, so that’s another €5 please.
Now onto the payment options, and some good innovation here – three payment options – Card, PayPal or Apple Pay. All reasonable options.
Pick a method… any method.
I chose ApplePay. One touch later… that I had the e-ticket in my hand. With the airline wanting to do more up-selling.
Boom. All done. But in the meantime, would you like to buy some more things for your fare?
The time spent from firing up the App to completing the booking process – it took a grand total of 3 minutes to get everything done, dusted and the PNR mailed to my in-box.
Whilst I accept this was a very simple booking for one person, there are lessons here I feel for some airlines that seem to make their on-line or mobile booking processes as complex as possible. The simple ease of use of booking a ticket here made it actually rather enjoyable to book a ticket – rather than a drawn out pain.
Things like this make the pre-flight passenger experience a lot more bearable – rather than re-entering data multiple times going back and forth through a booking engine.
Now if they could get rid of the yellow in the plane and the scratchcard sales, Ryanair could be a lot more pleasurable to fly…
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Nice! And I miss Porto so much that next month I’ll revisit it. 🙂