I agree it’s all marketing for people who feel they can barely afford to fly (but need to fly anyway), and who don’t use/trust comparison sites (middlemen).

I wonder if the aggressive upselling during the booking flow is part of this marketing too. If you really want the cheapest possible flight you will carefully decline all upsells and double-check the final bill for surcharges. This makes you feel you’ve shrewdly whittled the price down as far as possible.

Another way of looking at it is it just wears the customer down. If the booking flow were too smooth and didn’t include many points where the customer is forced to decline added luxuries, then you might be more likely to pause before confirming the transaction, and maybe open EasyJet’s site for a quick price comparison.

(ii) and (iii) evokes parallels to amazon.

I used to use Ryanair... until I found out how they treated wheelchair users. I'm happy for myself to be treated like a piece of meat. Not other, more vulnerable users. Screw Ryanair.

They already know the deal when they buy.

When people die from the way they let people wait, you tend to have a different vision of the whole thing than “you get what you pay for”.

When you entrust care of people you love to a company, you tend to expect more than capitalism tuned to the extreme.

And before you ask, yes, that’s exactly what happened to a family member of mine. “Wheelchair assistance” never showed up.

All caps for emphasis are against the HN guidelines.

What about the one incident in 2004 when they had to be taken to the High Court, on behalf of hundreds or thousands, to provide the legally required wheelchair transfers? Or the one incident where the disabled lad was left behind a day? Or the many one incidents disabled users have reported of being dropped from Ryanair flights because the airline couldn't be arsed to spend the time? Or the many single incidents of wheelchair users reporting that despite the UK and Irish court rulings Ryanair weren't allowing access to the wheelchair at the destination airports?

I've never heard of the incident you mention btw, but the thousands of reports are plenty to give me a view of Ryanair were I ever to end up disabled.

Can you provide details? It seems likely that this incident was overblown in the press but I'd like to know more.

What are wheelchair users vulnerable to besides physical assault? They can still travel just as readily as able-bodied people in planes, cars, trains, boats, etc. Neither can simply walk across the sea to another country.