[HN Gopher] Spain fines budget airlines EUR150M over 'abusive' c...
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Spain fines budget airlines EUR150M over 'abusive' cabin bag and
seat charges
Author : cpncrunch
Score : 55 points
Date : 2024-05-31 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| cpncrunch wrote:
| I agree that the 20E charge to print a paper ticket seems
| excessive, but I'm not sure about the bag fees. I know it's a bit
| annoying to get nickle and dimed for everything, but on the other
| hand it makes sense to only charge passengers for the services
| they need.
| kyriakos wrote:
| It's about carry on bag not checked in luggage though.
| marcinzm wrote:
| It still costs fuel to carry the weight and slows down the
| boarding/un-boarding process. Especially if overhead bins
| fill up and bags need to be, chaotically, checked in at the
| gate since then you also need more gate attendants. Some
| passengers don't need anything more than the personal under
| seat bag for their trip.
|
| So charging for carry on bags is a logical approach if you
| wish to minimize the operating costs of the airline which
| budget airlines do.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Planes are typically used for longer trips though, not for
| getting an ice-cream from the stand around the corner. It
| is reasonable to expect some baggage allowance, the whole
| trip rarely makes sense without it. Charging for carry-on
| bags is almost like charging you for the air you breathe.
| It is abusive, because it's basically lying about the real
| cost of the ticket.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I haven't checked a bag or brought a non personal item
| carry on in 8 years. You can easily fit 4 sets of
| clothes, a jacket, etc.
|
| >It is abusive, because it's basically lying about the
| real cost of the ticket.
|
| In the US every airline that does this makes it comically
| clear. Spirit, the one people always make fun of for
| nickel and diming, has multiple screens before you book
| telling you that it'll cost extra for bags. Every other
| airline does similar.
|
| Yes queue the 'but I have 9 children' posts, obviously
| then you need to pay a bag fee.
| arp242 wrote:
| RyanAir most does fairly short trips (1-2 hours), and
| tons of people do weekend returns and such. You don't
| need checked baggage for anything less than a week.
|
| I've seen tons of people with 3 bags, huge bags, and
| things like that. Frustratingly, this mostly affects
| people like me who _don 't_ do that, because I'll be the
| one asked to put my relatively small backpack under the
| seat because they're out of space, and being close to 2
| metres it's not like I have tons of space to start with.
| Never too happy about that.
|
| I haven't flown in a while, but generally RyanAir has
| been pretty relaxed about this, probably because it's
| just not worth the hassle and all of that. But seriously,
| fuck these people and fuck their fucking bags and I don't
| blame RyanAir for placing some incentives to stop the
| excesses.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| My understand of the 1960's Spanish law which applies here
| is that the volume of luggage that is accepted as carry-on
| is fixed by the aircraft manufacturer (e.g. size of the
| overhead bins), and not the airline: the airline cannot
| arbitrarily decide the max volume of carry-on that
| passengers are allowed to bring (and worse, cannot
| selectively enforce a different limit for different
| passengers).
|
| I can clearly see the slippery slope if rules like this
| were not be enforced.
| marcinzm wrote:
| In my experience the overhead bins are never large enough
| to accommodate everyone having the allowed sized carry on
| luggage. Which leads to bags getting gate checked fairly
| often.
| nickjj wrote:
| > It still costs fuel to carry the weight and slows down
| the boarding/un-boarding process.
|
| This is true but if we want to play the pure fairness game
| should someone who is 150 pounds pay less than someone who
| is 200 pounds? What about a 90 pound kid? These are drastic
| differences in weight and all 3 humans would likely fit in
| the dimensions of 1 standard economy seat.
|
| Arbitrarily charging upwards of $200 USD to check a bag at
| the gate because your carry on personal item was 0.5 pounds
| too heavy doesn't seem reasonable. A lot of consumer grade
| scales aren't even accurate to half a pound, you may have
| done the work to measure it and be wrong because you don't
| have a high precision scale that's as accurate as the
| industrial scale at the airport.
| lxgr wrote:
| 20EUR seems almost reasonable - I think I've seen Ryanair
| charge far more than 100 at some point.
| gpm wrote:
| 100EUR for a... piece of paper!?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _100EUR for a... piece of paper!?_
|
| For having a person who could be helping someone with real
| issues print a piece of paper instead, yes.
| lxgr wrote:
| I'd be more sympathetic to that view if Ryanair didn't
|
| - Prohibit showing the QR code from a PDF on your phone
| (it _has_ to be printed on physical paper, or you have to
| use the app instead)
|
| - Make it intentionally hard/impossible to get your
| boarding pass bought from a third-party reseller into
| their first-party app
|
| In other words, my "non-real issue" was entirely
| manufactured by Ryanair to extract more money from me (by
| frustrating third-party resellers without outright
| banning them in a way that makes them prone to
| competitive lawsuits)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| To be clear, those are problems. But a fee for a
| boarding-pass print only exceeding the cost of the paper
| it's printed on is totally reasonable.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yup. I think it was approximately 150EUR when this happened
| to me.
|
| There's even an entire second-order cottage industry
| benefiting from that practice: At the airport I was trying
| to board, there was a copyshop offering PDF printouts for
| 50 cent a page (yay) - except if the page is a boarding
| pass, for which the rate is then 10EUR.
|
| Yes, they employ a person to specifically check what you're
| printing...
| arp242 wrote:
| RyanAir's business model is hyper-aggressive penny-pinching
| on basically everything that allows pinching pennies.
|
| The costs are so high because they want to really really
| disincentive people from using staff for this kind of
| thing, so on average they won't have to hire as much staff.
|
| This is one reason why some RyanAir flights can be as low
| as EUR20 (whereas e.g. KLM is EUR200 for a similar or
| identical flight).
|
| On bigger airports it's not a huge problem because you can
| typically use the machines, which are free.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| I was caught by this surprise pricing once, so I'll explain:
| printing a boarding pass at the airport is EUR20, but that's
| only if you have checked in online beforehand.
|
| But checking in in-person is EUR0 only if there's more than 2
| hours left until the planned departure, it is EUR55 if there
| is less. So in practice, a lot of people end up paying EUR75
| for something that's free when flying with other airlines.
|
| In Ryanair's defence, they explain it on their site. But if
| you are booking via e.g. Kiwi.com, you will probably never
| visit Ryanair's site and you will miss this detail.
| quonn wrote:
| Moreover, if you arrive at the airport 3 hours before but
| spend one hour in the check-in queue, you will fall into
| the two hours time window and pay 50 EUR for effectively
| having the boarding pass printed.
|
| A court in Vienna previously ruled against them, but they
| just ignore that everywhere else.
| lxgr wrote:
| > But if you are booking via e.g. Kiwi.com, you will
| probably never visit Ryanair's site and you will miss this
| detail.
|
| And that's exactly why they even do this in the first
| place!
|
| They can't outright ban Kiwi.com from reselling their
| tickets, so they fight a proxy fight on the backs of their
| own customers.
|
| I'm glad to hear that they have at least dropped their fee
| significantly; back when I ran into this issue, they were
| charging over 100EUR.
| nickjj wrote:
| Is printing it necessary btw?
|
| I ask because RyanAir has official documentation at
| https://help.ryanair.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/12889667116433-Wh... and
| https://help.ryanair.com/hc/en-
| us/sections/12488861427857-Bo....
|
| The way I parse them is if you're flying anywhere, unless
| it's from Morocco or specific airports listed in their FAQ
| then you don't need to physically print your boarding pass
| as long as you can pull it up on your phone. This would
| include foreign travelers such as someone from the US who
| is flying between countries in the EU based on there not
| being an explicit call out for that.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Ryanair doesn't allow you to login online for printing
| tickets with just PNR - they require email for 2fa. Which you
| don't get when booking via third party. Got caught by this
| while travelling with a party of 6. EUR120 down the drain.
| Third party sheds any responsibility.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Ryanair is basically a criminal operation, they should be
| wiped out from the face of Earth.
| m463 wrote:
| I think paper tickets should be always be free.
|
| A better approach would be to offer an incentive for tickets on
| your phone (as long as it wasn't a data grab)
| Tenoke wrote:
| Just checkin for free on your phone and use your phone as a
| ticket. I fly with Ryanair often enough and honestly wasn't
| even aware there's still a fee like that.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Spain could also look into fining all these scammy car rental
| agencies that operate at or near airport. They are totally
| abusive and should be not just fined but fined to death.
|
| It's these kind of things, as in TFA, that makes life miserable
| for tourists.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I'm curious, how are those scammy? I always rent the car in
| advance and never had any issue, I've done that in Spain
| several times but only in the islands (Canary and Balearic).
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| I'd like to hear more about this.
|
| It's always been unpleasant interacting with them, but I
| haven't seen anything abusive. Usually I'm told I either have
| to leave a huge deposit or buy insurance. Is this what the
| abuse is supposed to be? I don't love it, but I can't say it's
| a crazy notion.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Even in Alaska, if you go to Anchorage you'd be well advised
| to take an Uber to a car rental place at least a couple of
| miles from the airport.
|
| All sorts of BS, like "we have to phone your insurance
| company to verify your coverages" (at 11pm), or same with
| credit card, etc, to be "allowed" to waive their insurance.
| Oh, and the regular car you reserved, and several of them you
| can see on the lot? They're unavailable. And the manager
| isn't here to authorize a discount on a larger or premium
| vehicle. And so on.
| hammock wrote:
| Lol they do that at Denver too. You have to be an assertive
| kind of personality to get thru that. Or just don't book
| with one of the discount desks and stick to hertz/alamo
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Never Hertz again. Not to mention their recent "stolen
| car" debacle, Hertz pulled their own even shadier shit on
| me in Washington.
|
| "Sorry, our security system was unable to verify you." No
| explanation of what that was, or meant, or what was being
| verified. Despite dozens of incident free rentals in the
| past, etc., no issues on my license, etc. "We are not
| going to be able to rent to you."
|
| Hand over my credit card and start pulling up an Uber to
| go to a nearby Enterprise. "Fine, whatever, just put my
| refund back on this card."
|
| "Sorry, prepaid rentals are non-refundable."
|
| "I didn't get to rent anything, as you just pointed out."
|
| Had to go to Corporate to reverse that one, was about 2
| minutes from a chargeback.
| MarkSweep wrote:
| Hertz hurts, it's right in the name.
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| My very selfish reason for becoming pro cabin bag charges is how
| much quicker it has made boarding planes.
|
| The way people took the piss with the bags they brought on board
| before was ridiculous and resulted in a big delay of people
| trying to find space for their oversized bags of stuff they
| absolutely don't need for their weekend trip.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've been a bit skeptical of this theory. It's not really true
| of budget airlines but business travelers and frequent flyers
| with status just don't want to check bags because it takes
| longer and can have complications with flight changes.
|
| Personally, I rarely check bags (mostly if I need checked for
| outdoor activities) but the money has basically nothing to do
| with it.
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| Sorry I wasn't even thinking about non-budget airlines when I
| commented. I was talking about budget airlines (Ryanair,
| specifically) with my comment
| ghaff wrote:
| Fair enough. I've never taken one of those airlines.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| People started doing it in part because the airlines were
| taking outrageous times to get bags.
|
| Ironically, that's been very much improved. With Delta and
| Alaska now, it's actually quite rare that I get to baggage
| claim and my bags are not already there.
| nico wrote:
| True. Recently flew Alaska. They announced on speaker that if
| your bag didn't come out within a certain time (I think it
| was 20min), you were entitled to some compensation or even
| the refund of the flight
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It really depends on the airport not so much the airline.
| cjk2 wrote:
| Yeah this. Also the plane tickets are so bloody cheap these
| days that the baggage doesn't hurt a bit.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| at least in the US they started asking people to pay for
| checked bags first, so the airlines caused this whole "rush for
| the overhead bins" problem.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| In Brazil too. There used to be plenty of space on the
| overhead bins, and people used to get in and out of the plane
| without any hush or messy corridors.
| m463 wrote:
| I think not charging for checked bags and some sort of friction
| for carry-on bags would be best.
|
| Maybe checked bags are free, and people with carry-on bags
| board last (unless they have kids)
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Basically what spirit does is charge you $65 for a carry on
| but $60 for a checked bag. Fastest boarding/deboarding
| experience I've seen short of when you get to walk on the
| tarmac and access the plane from both ends.
| nickjj wrote:
| I'm surprised they didn't mention TAP Air Portugal which
| routinely flies from Portugal to Spain using standard sized
| planes. They also have a number of international flights from the
| US to Portugal.
|
| Their hand bag requirement is substantially smaller than most
| other airlines.
|
| It's 16" x 12" x 6" (40cm x 30cm x 15cm) with a 4.4 lb (2 kg) max
| weight. That depth 6" / 15cm measurement is substantially smaller
| than most other airlines as well as the weight. Most other
| airlines have 2-3" (~5cm) more in depth and allow triple the
| weight. It makes a noticeable difference if you plan a trip with
| 2 backpacks.
|
| If you happen to need to check it at the gate, they charge
| $80-$220 USD depending on where you're coming from and going to.
| aeurielesn wrote:
| > The government investigation also looked at concerns around a
| lack of transparency by the airlines over the final price of
| services when booking online, and the decision to block cash
| payments at the airport for additional services.
|
| I just went through this a week ago and I was shocked RyanAir was
| doing this as I was sure this was not legal in the EU.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I am slight surprised over this, but seems to follow what the US
| Does with these fines.
|
| If it was up to me, all passengers for say the past 7 years will
| get a full refund of all their baggage fees + 100 EUR + 10%
| interest compounded per year.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _all passengers for say the past 7 years will get a full
| refund of all their baggage fees + 100 EUR + 10% interest
| compounded per year_
|
| Congratulations, you have an airline monopoly because everyone
| went bankrupt or became so imperilled they had to merge to
| survive.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is what I came to comment about as well. In other words,
| it's just a tax without going to the legislature to implement
| the tax. It will only be levied when someone decides it's time
| to levy it again, so it's somewhat convenient.
|
| The government didn't pay those heinous fees, yet they end up
| with the money? Like seriously, who does that make sense to
| other than corrupt bureaucrats? The obvious thing would be as
| you suggest to refund fees directly to those that were charged.
| Maybe then levy a fine on top of those refunds as a punishment
| that goes to the government just to add salt to the wound.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I just flew with Ryanair and yes, the fees for luggage etc are
| expensive, but if you don't take luggage and any extras they
| offer, they are amazing value. I hope the cheap airlines don't
| get overrun with fines because if not for them I'd barely see my
| parents.
| madjam002 wrote:
| I've flown a lot with Ryanair, Easyjet and Wizz Air, and apart
| from Wizz Air adding mysterious a "System surcharge" if you use
| an ad blocker (although I think they've stopped doing this), I
| don't mind the extra charges at all.
|
| Surely if they ban cabin bag and seat charges, then the base fare
| is just going to go up for everyone?
|
| Memes and jokes aside, I actually find Ryanair to be a better
| service a lot of the time compared to Easyjet and more
| transparent with pricing, even though Easyjet is almost always
| more expensive on the routes I fly.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I don't mind the extra charges but I question whether removing
| the fines associated with them would result in an increase in
| base fare.
|
| If they just universally enforced that all oversize bags paid
| the PS15 or whatever priority fee, instead of some people just
| getting unlucky because they didn't bring a tape measure on
| holiday and are 3cm over, I think it could even be net positive
| revenue wise.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| It would be much better if they just had a streamlined process
| for charging for larger bags at the airport, and if the fee were
| roughly the same whether done in advance or not.
|
| As it stands, forgetting that Wizz Air requires bags 6cm smaller
| than easyJet and then getting told you can either pay more than
| your ticket cost originally or go home, but only sometimes if you
| get "caught", is just a bit... I dunno, uncivilized, I guess?
|
| If you make it say, PS15 in advance, PS20 at the airport, that is
| enough to encourage people to do it in advance as long as bags
| are all checked, you don't need to be punitive.
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