Yeah, it's right up there with the rest of the shady business practices.

Delta, for example, charges more physical cash for a cash+miles ticket than for a pure cash ticket (every time I've been inclined to try to use miles over the last few years anyway). I get that they maybe don't meet the legal barrier for fraud, but even a child can see that it's unethical.

Toss in the seat-selection UI (strongly suggesting you have to select a seat if you don't know the game and figure out how to exit that menu, but every possible seat has an upcharge above the ticket price), "trip insurance" which is insanely overpriced and mostly only covers the things the airline is already required to reimburse you for, and everything else they do, and it's obvious that when a new anti-feature comes out (mandatory app usage being the latest and greatest) it just exists to scam a few more dollars out of you and lie a bit more about the true ticket price.

I am going to summarize with - they want you to use their app for monetization and ux purposes.

They move 200 million passengers a year. The app is full of upsell. Please explain how your open standard accomplishes their goals

You can upsell just fine through a website.

I used this app over the weekend, it's actually quite handy. Can't help but notice those priority boarding and seat selection buttons while checking for the gate number. You can also order food from your phone in the cabin using some magical Bluetooth protocol I didn't understand

Just to be clear I think their policy is horrifically abusive, but I can totally see why they're doing it

Their goal is not my goal. My goal is to fly to a destination. A paper ticket has always been enough for that. And if they want to upsell a web page can be full of upselling too. But I don't want upsells, only a flight and air companies are commodities. Imagine if I had to install an app for every chain of gas pumps around my country and the nearby ones.

> But I don't want upsells

Ryan is cheap because they sell you lottery tickets on the plane.

If you don’t want upsells there are airlines that cater to that as well.

I refuse to ever fly Southwest because of their history of open seating. I refuse to ever fly Spirit or other American discount airlines because I want to keep the nickle and diming to a minimum. I fly less than I could if I sought out rock bottom airfares, and that’s ok.

And they’re OK with that as well, clearly :)

I understand not wanting to deal with open seating but continuing to boycott an airline after they fixed your pet-peeve makes no sense to me.

My reasoning: fuck ‘em. That and loyalty points.

In many European segments we're finding them comparably priced. If we factor getting to the Ryanair airports, luggage, etc., sometimes we're better off flying, say, Brussels Airlines. And I'd happily buy food in Ryanair flights if their catalogue had any proper food.

The GP was commenting on the motivations of Ryanair, and the parent was responding to that.

I think with these kinds of ideological issues, all one can do is vote with their wallet. Nobody is forcing you to fly Ryanair, there are other choices, and if you don't like their practices, don't fly with them. If enough people do it, then they might change their ways, but if their 80% number is accurate, you're probably just stuck not flying with them anymore and nobody else is going to care but you, unfortunately.

Not trying to be rude at all... you said their goal is not yours, so that's why you choose not to do business with them. Every business can't please everyone at the same time.

> I think with these kinds of ideological issues, all one can do is vote with their wallet

Needs to be viewed in the light of the distinctly un-open market in which airlines operate. There are only so many airports, and only so many slots. I might wish to start another airline which customers may use an open solution but the reality is that incumbents have a massive moat around them. No market, that I know of, is perfect but air travel is an unusually distorted one.

Though much less distorted in the EU than in the US. It's common to have the choice between 2-3 different airlines to get from one place to another, and if that's not good enough the next major airport is frequently just a 2-3 hour train journey away

This was going to be my comment. "vote with your wallet" only works in open competitive markets. But (with a few exceptions), this is not the world we live in. Regulation is the only option left. You have to vote with your vote to get laws in place that force industry to behave better.

> Imagine if I had to install an app for every chain of gas pumps around my country and the nearby ones.

Oh Great. Some oil company CEO's nephew in tech just read this and sent it to his uncle. Who will adopt it forthwith.

That’s pretty much what the EV charging landscape is, right?

Imagine you drive an EV and that's exactly what you have to do.

True for everybody but Tesla. If you have a Tesla you install the app once to enter your credit card and then you can delete the app if you wish. All you need to recharge is the ability to drive the car (which doesn't require the app).

Not true for Electrify America and many other chargers.

Plug and charge is supported on many vehicles, and you can skip the app entirely and just pay by card.

Why do they force you to install the app just to enter a credit card? Sounds like something a website could do just fine.

But, it's not. All EV's in Europe I've driven had a simple plastic charging card, no apps required.

I don't think it helps if you're arguing their position. We don't want to allow them to upsell. They're crossing the line into social ostracization grounds.

At this point, their destruction of social trust is so severe that simply boycotting is not enough, just like you don't just boycott a company that's doing environmental destruction. They simply need to be stopped, regardless of their goals.

Which I assume also means you need to agree to a shitty, user-hostile ToS?

Actually, it isn’t even possible in all cases.

I literally have just got home from a Ryanair flight where they provided me with no option but a paper boarding pass for my daughter.

It’s essentially a result of a crazy hack they’ve implemented to support families who have Ryanair prime.

You can only name adults as Ryanair prime members, and when you book through a Ryanair prime account, you can only book for the named members. There’s a maximum of two per account, as it’s intended for couples. The kids, aged 2-16, you have to make a “linked booking”. You don’t get boarding passes through the app or email - the only option is to go to a customer service desk and have them print you a paper boarding pass.

Also… digital boarding passes are an open standard - IATA BCBP. You can go make your own.

https://www.iata.org/contentassets/1dccc9ed041b4f3bbdcf8ee86...

Page | 32

2.6.3. Fraud Prevention

Ill-intentioned persons may falsify their BCBP by changing the flight number or class of service. They may also simply print two copies of the BCBP and pass one to a friend, or even create a counterfeit BCBP. Technical solutions exist, e.g. algorithms, called certificates, which can for example secure the bar code if necessary.

> And of course it's only possible using a specific proprietary app.

Right. I like email. I guess fuck me.

I wonder if its like frontier where they hide the standardized mobile boarding pass behind a dark pattern?

So far, you can just download the boarding pass to apple/google wallet after checking in. Only dark patterns are in their booking process.

So instead of one proprietary app now you need two?

What's darker than dark?

You can also take a screenshot of your ticket. The passes are just for convenience.

Ryanair app blocks screenshots

I just tried and it does not (Android)

Do you perhaps have biometric unlocking disabled?

I do use biometric auth.

Vantadark patterns.

There are plenty of open-source apps that can store & show .pkpass files, though I don't know if they're compatible with Frontier's passes

Ryanair is the dark pattern. Like damn.

Its so they can collect a fee of 50 euros or pounds off you when your phone battery is flat or the app otherwise doesn't work.

It is said on their website that if you lose your phone or it dies, you can get a free boarding pass at the airport.

Source: https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/lp/explore/digital-boarding-pa...

This should be at the top of this thread... it practically makes the whole thing a nothingburger.

It moves the app one notch back from mandatory, but that's still enough to be a real problem. That method is going to have very low capacity and if you lie about your phone being dead or elsewhere that might screw you over.

> if you lie about your phone being dead or elsewhere that might screw you over.

I would bet money this will never happen, but ok.

Last year I purchased a ticket to a Broadway show in NYC. I refused to use their digital ticketing nonsense, and when I showed up at the box office just before showtime and said my phone wasn't working (for my own definition of "working") they just handed me paper tickets. So I have to believe every one of these companies must have a way of issuing tickets when people's phones "don't work."

So always carry a dead phone with you when flying Ryanair.

Yes. Scooping up user data is just another revenue stream. That is the point.

Particularly for airlines. For years actually flying passengers hasn't been profitable, it's all about side income that makes a profit [1].

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/the-four-biggest-us-airlines-al...

There's a YouTube video that talks about how valuable the major US airlines reward program is. The market cap of each airline is less than the value of each airline's reward program at the time the video was made.

I recall Apple was valued in a similar manner back in the late 1990s. Their market cap was barely more than cash on hand. Talk about missed investing opportunities...

Not that I'm saying airlines are the next AAPL.

edit - here's the video - "How Airlines Quietly Became Banks" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4

i cant believe i'm about to defend Ryanair but just fwiw it seems quite normal to do a custom app specifically for tickets, for anticheat purposes + the nicety of putting your ticket in Apple Wallet is nice enough that i willingly do it for the airlines i fly.

ok that wasnt really defending Ryanair but just being argumentative for the sake of fairness. obviously Ryanair doesn't have Ticketmaster level tech.

It absolutely doesn't take an app to issue a boarding pass which will appear in your Apple Wallet. It's literally a zip (with extension .pkpass) containing a master JSON, a few assets like logos and a digital signature. There are tutorials for making your own.

Many airlines let you download one once you check in on their website, or email you one, or embed a download link in an SMS, just to name 3 alternatives.

Recent experience with United: the SMS option was deeply broken (as in couldn't actually get one boarding pass from the link in SMS). Their kiosks were crap too (as in attendant tries to tell me I'm doing it wrong, then they can't do it, and they finally have to check me in on their own terminal).

The overall UX/UI of airlines is terribly broken.

2025 Web of Shit papering over a 1950s era backend.

No. I'm app fatigued and over it. Let's put some power back into he hands of consumers for once.

It may be "quite normal" to you, but that doesn't mean it's good. Stockholm syndrome comes to mind here.

Until technology gives us better controls, we must assume that every app, particularly those from large profit-driven corporations, is hostile.

It may be hostile to you, bit that doesn't mean it is hostile. Paranoia syndrom comes to mind here.

It's true that not all apps are hostile, but my pessimism and paranoia aren't unfounded. If you think the current state of software, security, privacy, etc, is fine and dandy and doesn't warrant skepticism, then our shared reality is probably too fractured to have a meaningful debate.

I work in cybersecurity, heading the group in a company you know. I also develop open source software. So I am painfully aware of the pandemic of cybersecurity issues we face professionally and at home.

Progress has its good and bad aspects, and we must fight as much as possible in some battles, and choose them wisely. This is why the EU efforts around privacy are great, and without their drawbacks. But ultimately they are great.

Being infuriated as I see in this thread about the decision of a company to use mobiles as boarding passes is not something I adhere to. One can always fly with another airline that does not have these restrictions, and complain on another thread how expensive this is.

Saying that all of current technology is evil means going off the grid and living a quiet life in a remote forest. This is of course a solution.

Saying that some technology is evil (and it definitely is) means fighting for these specific things to be regulated. Ryan Air's digital boarding passes is not one of them.

I'm not trying to crusade against digital boarding passes, my issue is with normalizing mandatory apps for all the things.

If we had high quality, trusted software, leveraging open standards, that would be one thing, but instead we have janky proprietary snowflake apps that are borderline malware. Like you said, it's a pandemic of cybersecurity issues, so it's hard for me to accept the 'just install the app' mentality.

I agree we should pick our battles, but I don't believe regulation is the only solution worth fighting for. My comment was to nudge cultural change, by pushing back against what I see as a bad practice.

Why does a boarding pass need a rootkit? ("anticheat" is usually code for root kits, and at least it has some positive trade off for users in the video game case)

They can just check the scanned pass against their own database to verify authenticity. They could also cryptographically sign it.

You can usually get the ticket printed at the desk, print it at home, have a PDF on any device like a Kindle, take a screenshot of the QR code, add to your wallet on your phone even without proprietary apps, etc…

I download the airline’s apps, but I hate relying exclusively on these potentially unreliable apps, or unreliable phones so I always get the ticket in other formats, too: always have an analog version, and some form of digital version on at least two devices.

I don’t travel often, but when I do, missing a flight would be expensive or annoying, so it’s a reasonable trade off for me, ymmv. With that said, I also don’t fly Ryanair, so they can do whatever they want.

btw ryanair charges you like $75 for printing at the desk haha

Why do you need to download and run an app to get your ticket into your phone's Wallet?

Open source should work hard on a "universal" VM to load these types of apps into.

There’s an easy solution. Don’t fly Ryanair! I’m perfectly happy to take this sacrifice in exchange for cheaper tickets