The old maxim attributed to the American department store owner Marshall Field that the customer is always right never really held much sway with Ryanair. But the airline seems to have taken its disdain for the rule to new levels in the current furore about changes to the way in which it enforces its policy on the size of bag you can take on board as cabin baggage. Not only is the customer not right on this occasion, but the customer is actually making it all up.
Since writing last week about Ryanair passengers reporting that a tougher attitude is being adopted of late at the boarding gate, The Irish Times consumer affairs correspondent Conor Pope has received something in the region of 200 emails and social media messages from disgruntled passengers. The complaints are mostly variations on a theme. Bags that people say they have taken on board for years or appear to fit in the sizers – as the boarding gate measuring devices are called – are now deemed too big and their owners charged €75 to put it in the hold.
Ryanair’s response was characteristically tetchy. “Passengers ‘sharing their stories’ is not indicative of anything other than misinformed passengers,” it told Pope.
The airline reiterated that its policy was “if the bag meets, (or is smaller than) our agreed dimensions, it gets on without charge. If it is not, then it is bigger than our agreed dimensions, and it will be charged”.
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However, the airline did also point out that “we can’t guarantee it [the fee] will be charged every time a passenger flies, but if passengers do not comply with their agreed bag dimensions, then we expect our handlers to charge them appropriately”.
The Ryanair passengers who contacted The Irish Times are clearly suffering from some sort of simultaneous mass delusion, but it’s not unreasonable to deduce that the airline adopts a flexible approach towards enforcing its policies, otherwise it could guarantee you would be charged.
If so, it seems fair to assume that the current controversy may have arisen because the airline has adopted a more rigorous approach to enforcing its rules of late. You would, of course, be wrong to do so. The passengers who contacted The Irish Times were clearly hallucinating.
Why would Ryanair change its policy? To do so would be completely out of character with the misanthropy that is integral to the airline’s brand and its long history of cleverly manipulating its passengers’ behaviour in ways that it claims – not without justification – reward them with lower fares.
Looking back over the various methods of passenger torture-cum-education adopted by Ryanair since it introduced its low-cost model in the early 1990s, it’s easy to see how they served the wider goal of cutting costs and reducing fares. Everything from flying into secondary airports to making it impossible to recline your seat served this purpose. With the advent of online booking came another raft of opportunities to offer passengers fresh routes to self-improvement, particularly around bags.
[ Ryanair dismisses hundreds of reader baggage experiences as misinformed ‘hearsay’Opens in new window ]
Customers were pushed towards bringing a small bag into the cabin by being charged for a larger bag in the hold. The net result was quicker turnarounds, lower handling fees and so on. And ultimately cheap fares. It’s tempting – but once again entirely wrong – to imagine the yield management gurus sitting around at Dublin Airport one afternoon doing a bit of brainstorming and realising that a tougher approach to cabin bags could deliver some hidden benefit.
Over the last 30 years of the Faustian pact between Ryanair and its passengers there has been an arms race of sorts. At the same time as Ryanair was training us to pack for a city break using a 55x40x20cm bag that weighs exactly 10kg, we were developing all sort of little hacks to squeeze in another pair of underpants.
We have long passed the point where there is space in the overhead bins or “under” the seat in front of you for all the carry-on bags on a fully booked fight. The associated messing around at the boarding gate as some people’s bags are “put in the hold” against their will may be eating into profits. Likewise, the free-for-all as passengers try to put their bag into an overhead bin somewhere in the vicinity of where they are sitting is slowing up boarding and disembarkation.
Perhaps the clampdown on cabin bags sizes that is – let’s say it again – manifestly a figment of its passengers’ imaginations is just an attempt by Ryanair to change the behaviour of those who have been gaming the system. Or maybe the airline has just woken up to the fact that it is leaving money on the table by not rigorously imposing its own rules.
But this is only idle speculation because, as we all know, there has been no change in policy.
