Finally, Ryanair has done it: offended me so much that I have vowed never to let myself be herded onto one of its garish planes ever again. It can stuff its scratchcards up its thrust reversers. I am not going to be sold trinkets, overpriced bottles of water. I am not going to be hounded for extra cash if my bag doesn’t into one of the ever-shrinking cages at its departure gates. I am taking a train to Berlin instead, even if it takes me two days to get there.
Until now, I had always been one of those people who complained about Ryanair, found the experience of flying on its planes humiliating and yet somehow always ended up flying with it regardless because it always seemed to going where I wanted and offer the cheapest flight. I have long aspired but sadly rarely reached the social standing of the late Rod Liddle, who once memorably wrote that he felt a sense of superiority looking across from the EasyJet queue to the poor buggers in the Ryanair queue, on the grounds that while he accepted he had fallen a long way in life, he hadn’t fallen THAT far.
Living in East Anglia is a particular curse because it means that your nearest option is almost always Ryanair’s hub at Stansted. When I considered the alternative of fighting my way around the M25 while the minutes ticked down to departure time from Heathrow or Gatwick, I almost always ended up plumping for Ryanair instead.
So what was it that finally drove me away from Ryanair? It wasn’t being abandoned in Lanzarote as 89 passengers were last year after the airline decided it couldn’t be bothered to wait for passport control. It wasn’t the time I attempted to claim on its piss poor insurance when my laptop screen got broken on a trip to Germany. It wasn’t being delivered to an airport which is actually 70 miles from the city the plane professed to be flying to and having to catch a bus the rest of the way. No, the final straw was the realisation that I would no longer be allowed to travel with a paper boarding pass and would have to download the Ryanair app instead before I could check in.
Is there any word in the English language more depressing than ‘app’? Fine when it works but if you are utterly dependent on one it won’t be long before you are launched headlong into technological dystopia. Admittedly I am a bit rough with mobile phones; I tend to sit on them, lose them, scratch them, throw them against a wall in frustration. I also tend to holiday in remote places where there is no reception and nowhere to charge them. Rarely has one of my phones survived a holiday entirely unscathed. But ultimately it never mattered because I always had a paper boarding pass tucked away in a pocket, plus another copy zipped up in a money belt just to be sure. I am not going to risk being marooned in a foreign country where I cannot access he means to board the plane on which I am booked.
Living in East Anglia is a particular curse because it means that your nearest option is almost always Ryanair’s hub at Stansted
Even worse was one of Ryanair’s explanations for why it felt necessary to ban paper boarding passes. It would ‘save 300 tonnes of paper annually’. For Jesus sake, this is an airline which spent 5.2 billion Euros on jet fuel in 2025 – which, if it bought at an average price, means it must have burned its way through around 2 billion gallons of the stuff. Doesn’t that have just a slightly higher impact on the environment than fell a few spruce trees? I can take a lot of greenwashing by corporations but trying to dress this up as an environmental measure really takes the biscuit – or 7 Euro croissant. Ryanair wants us on its app for the same reason as all companies want us on their apps: they want to control us, collect data on us, target us with marketing. And if its app goes down, as all electronic systems seem to do from time to time, that is just too bad. Just take a trip on the internet and read of the agonised enquiries of travellers complaining that the Ryanair app has frozen and what do they do as they have a plane to catch. In September, the app suffered a major failure.
Sorry, but a trip on the internet is as far as I am prepared to go with Ryanair any more. If I really want to go somewhere, I am going to travel by other means.
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