Aer Lingus 'free tickets'

[Rich00cap]

I'm a huge fan of Ryanair but even I have to admit that their call to Aer Lingus to apologise for offering free tickets when they actually cost € 23 is a bit rich; Ryanair have been doing this for years! How often have we seem FREE FLIGHTS emblazoned on the website with 'taxes and charges' excluded in small letters beneath? Anyone remember the inflight free flight raffle of a few years back? I 'won' a 'free flight' and chose a trip to Fez in Morocco. When I called to book it it actually cost me £ 58 in taxes and charges!.

[atoutprix]

I tried to book an Aer Lingus "free" BRU-DUB-BRU : with the taxes and the handling fee, it would have cost me more than 60 euros.
I have just booked a "5 euros per flight" CRL-GRO-CRL , it cost me 2 x 5 = 10 euros plus 10 euros credit card fee, total paid 20 euros.

Fact :
- to an Aer Lingus "free" flight you have to add the taxes and the handling charge
- to a Ryanair "5 euros" flight you have to add only the credit card fee.

It seems to me that Ryanair is more honest in this occurence :

Ryanair Calls on Aer Lingus to Apologize
TO CONSUMERS FOR THEIR €23 ‘FREE’ FLIGHTS SCAM

Ryanair, Ireland’s only low fares airline, today (22nd Oct) labelled Aer Lingus scam artists as it slammed their attempt to fool passengers with so called “free seats” which actually cost consumers at least €23. Ryanair confirmed that it is the only airline that can offer really FREE flights which include taxes and charges and suggested that the only reason the Aer Lingus web site experienced a crash was because so many passengers could not find any ‘free’ flights.

Stephen McNamara, Ryanair, said:


“This latest mess is typical Aer Lingus. First of all they try to scam passengers with “free fares” when passengers have to pay at least €23 taxes and charge. Then their web site fails under the pressure of passengers trying, and failing to find any free flights whatsoever. Aer Lingus are hopeless amateurs when it comes to low cost airfares because they don’t have any.

“Aer Lingus should apologize to consumers for wasting their time advertising a free seats offer when these tickets weren’t free, they actually cost at least €23 each. This is almost 5 times the cost of Ryanair’s current 1Million €5 Euro seat sale – where seats on 250 routes to the UK & Europe cost exactly €5 (including taxes & charges).

“Perhaps Aer Lingus should do something more then just apologize? They could start by reducing their fuel surcharge “scam”, under which Aer Lingus passengers are still paying €100 fuel surcharges. Despite the fact that oil prices have fallen by over 50% in recent weeks, Aer Lingus haven’t reduced their fuel surcharge by even 1 cent. It’s time that Aer Lingus ended this anti-consumer fuel surcharge scam as well as their false advertising of “no fare” flights which actually cost over €23.”

[Master_Dn]

If you use visa electron you don't pay credit card fee with Ryanair. Even when Ryanair gives away free flights, you pay 1 cent but you can ask for a refund of that 1 cent ! So it is REALLY free.

BUT Ryanair's web site is also a mess. Most of time it is really slow and sometimes when you are selecting the day you want to travel, you get lots of errors like : "Unavailable... try again!" or "Your session has been locked". The old site was much better in my opinion, you even had the "find lowest fares" option.

[Rich00cap]

Still the words 'Pot' 'kettle' 'black' spring to mind, but as MOL always says, any publicity is good publicity which is probably the motivation behind the attack!

[Ryanairboy]

He's totally right ! Publicity is very very important for FR. For instance, 0.01 eur flights !