Why I hate Ryanair, in detail.

Last time I flew on Ryanair I swore I would never do it again. It was a bank holiday, and they only had one check-in person on the desk. We had to queue for over an hour just to drop out bags off - we'd "checked in" online, whatever that means when you don't get a seat allocation and you have to queue to leave your bags anyway - and then we had to run to the departure desk, to queue again, to be allowed onto the hideously decorated, cramped and uncomfortable plane, with no seat allocations, which meant lots of begging other passengers to swap with us so we could sit with my nephews ago 4 and 2, because Ryanair don't let parents traveling with kids board first. I think you can buy priority boarding but it was too late for us to do that because it took us so long to "not" check in. Then of course there are all the extra charges for food and drink and so on. While we were on the plane my sister told me that you have to pay to use the loo, and I believed her. But it was just a joke. Or at least, it was just a joke until now.

If you follow this link you can see the head of Ryanair talking to the BBC about his plans to charge passengers £1 to use the toilet on the plane. I'd embed the clip, but BBC clips start automatically and the last thing I want is Michael O'Leary's demonic voice every time someone comes to this blog. You'll note that he couches this £1 charge as a saving, because all O'Leary wants to do is to keep the cost of air travel down, by increasing "discretionary charges". Going to the loo is discretionary, don't you know. It's something you can choose not to do. Like checking in, or having luggage, or taking your child's carseat with you, or all the other things that Ryanair charges you extra for.

OK, it is a budget airline, and I might consider cutting it some slack if it wasn't for this. This is the recent incident where a blogger posted about an error on the Ryanair website which meant that flights came up as costing 0.00, eliciting the following charming reply from a Ryanair employee:

jason! you're an idiot and a liar!! fact is!

you've opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they're mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

Following Jason's remarkably reasonable response, the employee returned to add:

Hehe - I found a bug that lets me show anything I want on your site.

All I have to do is put something along the lines of javascript:void(document.write('hehe')) into the address bar, and I can do whatever I want with your site ( or indeed any other site ).

I'm not sure what you think you've achieved here - that wouldn't have gotten you through to the back end. You wouldn't even have been able to enter passenger information.

You must never have seen a decent exploit, if you think this is something worth bragging about. There is another exploit you could try - wait until we're running a promotion when we give away a million odd seats for free anyway.

[Aside: free flights with Ryanair are (a) never actually free and (b) still too expensive in my book]

Pressed for comment, Ryanair released the following official statement which goes to prove that charm runs all the way through this company from the bottom to the top:

Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again.

Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

This idiot lunatic is happy to keep the blog sphere, and to leave the skies to Ryanair. They will never, ever get any of my money ever, ever again. Not even 0.00 of it. I would rather never fly again. I HATE THEM. It is hard for me to think of a company more openly contemptuous of their customers, although if you can, feel free to use the comments to let me know.

[goes off to buy Easyjet flight for her summer holiday to France.]