That “Don’t Insure Me” option hidden in the middle of a country list is pure evil. I’m used to seeing dark patterns everywhere but that’s a first for me.
From where I stand, it’s not fair to charge the hell out of people who fall for these tricks while giving steep discounts to the ones who don’t. Maybe there’s a “fool me once” aspect to Ryanair’s shenanigans, so at least their impact might be limited somehow.
To be fair, that is described as an 8 year old example. Their current UX is much more clear.
Their current pattern is more about playing into the fear of what happens without insurance, without selecting your seat, when you don't pay for early check in and forget to do it online on the day before the flight, or what happens if you show up with more or larger luggage than what you booked. Fears they themselves create with high fees for showing up with too much luggage or for checking in at the airport
There is still a bit of praying on people who are in a hurry or are impatient, don't read the screens and just click the most prominent button. The most obvious is the seat selection. But it's no longer the most prominent way they get you
About 1/3 of their revenue is ancillary (the dark patterns are there to cause ancillary revenue).
I just flew from Bournemouth to Alicante on Ryanair for £50. A similar flight in the US (DC to Miami, for example) would be easily 5x that, possibly 7-8x. The dark patterns took me about 10min to click through. Doing the math, that means my time would have to be worth $1500/hr which is higher than the take-home (not billable) of senior partners at law firms.
Ryanair has severely improved my life, especially for my fellow sun-deprived Northern Europeans.
Those incidentals would not increase your fare 5-8 times. So that some passengers fall into the dark patterns cannot possibly make up for the price difference nor can the price difference to US be the base for your cost savings.
>Those incidentals would not increase your fare 5-8 times
Oh I see what you're saying. What I'm saying is, what's the alternative? Another more expensive airline whose online check-in takes 5min instead of 10min? I'm contending that even with the dark patterns, my downside is only 1.5x cost, which is still far, far below a non-budget airline.
>nor can the price difference to US be the base for your cost savings
Yeah I agree it's not perfect — but as someone who used to live in the US it's a base for me
> would have to be worth $1500/hr which is higher than the take-home (not billable) of senior partners at law firms.
40
hours a week, 50 weeks a year, that's only $3 million/yr. If you've been at OpenAI for 10 years, you'll net more than that this year after they IPO.
Is seat selection really a dark pattern? Exit row seats are the most worthwhile add-on to buy when flying IMO, sometimes having even more leg room than business class seats for a fraction of the cost.
The funny thing about our era is that there is no censorship on corporations, but the state is very active in censoring individuals. Sometimes I feel that legal action is needed against the UX dark patterns of these corporations
Sure there's censorship on corporations. Look at how PayPal and other payment processors have been treating Steam lately. And any other platform that promotes individual freedom. Corporations are no longer immune as long as they don't support the ideology.
I wonder if this makes the world a fairer place actually. Because it allows people that are attentive and have time to dig through this to save money. The lowest price would be higher without these patterns.
It’s a polarizing idea, but frankly it’s what the world moves too and seem to work on the market. Some people are lazy or don’t have time and pay more money and some people have less time and dig through dark patterns, collect coupons or utilize ramp up subsidizing.
All those people that actually "work" through it will have less of a prime as if these patterns wouldn’t exist.
The question still remains would the world be a better place without these patterns,as it wastes time and acts against user intent.
It’s just a fascinating question to me, because a lot of things are not as simple as they seem of the first glance.
When I was a broke student I used a script to observe the RyanAir prices and frequently flew around Europe for extremely cheap (10kg carry-on/backpack). Good times. These dark patterns are a nuisance but easy enough to navigate around.
It's why they're cheap though. I fly around Europe for 30 euro's. If this is how that works, it works. And after hundred+ flights with them, believe me, I have had my share or RyanScam. I just play their game and laugh.
You go through what seems the entire check-in process, you get what seems like a summary at the end, with a link to a UK government site where you need to go next to get a travel authorization, I spend an hour doing that, finally finish that, I show up to the airport the next morning to be told I'm not checked in, having to pay a hefty fee to do a late check-in for each of my five passengers. The staff at the airport isn't really Ryanair's, so recourse there. (As if having real Ryanair staff would have made a difference.)
Same trip, coming back, we wait in the central terminal building until our gate is published. We go over to the gate, one of our passengers being in a wheelchair, needing an elevator, which are out of service. Friendly airport staff help us with the long detour to get to our gate. By now the doors are closed, we missed our flight. Again, having to pay a hefty fee to rebook for each of my five passengers. This is Ryanair staff, still no recourse. (But plenty of contempt.)
I admit defeat, but my wife is still motivated to talk to customer support. This is months ago, I don't think that went anywhere either. They're mostly impenetrable.
I don't mind their baggage policies, it's a known thing that there's upsales every step of the way, that's baked in by now (pretty much across the industry). But there's still plenty deep-dark patterns left.
Thank goodness that we can vote with our feet, right, and just don't buy from them anymore. But guess what, we booked another flight for next month :)
Bad UX (online, onsite, customer service) is not a bug. Ryanair makes you feel like livestock so you experience their cheapness. You must feel like they are milking everything they can to offer absolute lowest possible price.
This include never taking accountability when shit hits the fan.
Followed the app's instructions to go to gate 15, sat there waiting for the gate to open, until eventually getting a notification that I'd missed the flight from gate 30. Went to the help desk, was told that since I was the only person who made that mistake it was clearly my fault rather than the app (which was still displaying the wrong gate, even while I was at the help desk). Got booked on a $400 replacement flight for a journey which was originally $50. In the queue to board the replacement flight, I meet around 20 other people who missed the same flight for the same reason, all being told "it's clearly your own fault, ryanair has no responsibility here"...
If it sounds illegal, it usually is. Tricking people into buying things usually doesn't hold up in court. However, few cases ever make it there and that's what companies like these successfully gamble on.
I kind of rate Ryanair because while yes they are dodgy at least they’re honest about it and just own it, no fake niceties like you get from American companies.
And I’ve saved thousands of pounds in flights around Europe over the years so can’t really complain
Thanks very much for letting me know. I've just starting blogging again and the old Wordpress instance needs some love (or replacing...) I think I maybe enabled some background Captcha thing back in the day. It obviously doesn't work well as I have thousands of spam comments sitting in the moderate queue.
Last time I booked I was actually impressed with how well Ryanair was explaining everything. There is not much to clarify. You can see the same in the video in the post (which also features much clearer UX than the 8 year old example of the option in the country selector the article leads with).
If anything, RyanAir's strategy is to overexplain things, in hopes that people are unwilling to read what's on the screen and just click the first thing that advances the process
The problem is that, adapting Brandolini’s law, it is an order of magnitude harder to make an extension to circumvent these tricks when companies have teams that make daily changes to their applications to make it shittier than before
No comment about how you must download the app and it is the only way to access your pass? There is not even a QR code or barcode for the pass available any other way?
Yes, great point. Privacy / dark pattern concerns aside, I used to like having a paper pass in case something happened to my device. I wonder what would happen in practice if you printed a screenshot of the app? After all, a screenshot on a phone works fine.
My qualm is that corporate apps like this are malware and I don't want them on my device. Especially when they know the only way to get me to install it is to force it on me. That makes me especially not want it. So even installing the app in the first place just to get the code doesn't sit right.
So this has nothing to do with where the code is, but that getting access to it requires malware.
It is crazy how dark patterns are happening everywhere, for instance, in my country on post office automatons: basically in their UI, when they are asking to input your email address (which does not work with self-hosted email addresses without DNS, namely with IP literals, BTW), you cannot "see" the button to skip that step, since the button is different from all the others and clearly 'melted' in the background.
I don't think this is a mistake, but something malicous clearly thought through.
I am shocked that Ryanair stoop to such levels, because the Irish always come across as actually morally superior to many other people, and I thought that would extend to just implementing good and honest business practices at the expense of profit. I am also similarly shocked about past GDP shenanigans, aiding in tax evasion by large multinationals, and the Irish privacy regulator being so weak on GDPR violations. I don't get it - just an a few bad apples I guess. And also this happens in other countries so it's ok
It's okay, the service they provide is invaluable: cheap movement. If anything, I wish the EU was regulated by Ryanair to stop taking all my money for zero result.
From where I stand, it’s not fair to charge the hell out of people who fall for these tricks while giving steep discounts to the ones who don’t. Maybe there’s a “fool me once” aspect to Ryanair’s shenanigans, so at least their impact might be limited somehow.
Their current pattern is more about playing into the fear of what happens without insurance, without selecting your seat, when you don't pay for early check in and forget to do it online on the day before the flight, or what happens if you show up with more or larger luggage than what you booked. Fears they themselves create with high fees for showing up with too much luggage or for checking in at the airport
There is still a bit of praying on people who are in a hurry or are impatient, don't read the screens and just click the most prominent button. The most obvious is the seat selection. But it's no longer the most prominent way they get you
I just flew from Bournemouth to Alicante on Ryanair for £50. A similar flight in the US (DC to Miami, for example) would be easily 5x that, possibly 7-8x. The dark patterns took me about 10min to click through. Doing the math, that means my time would have to be worth $1500/hr which is higher than the take-home (not billable) of senior partners at law firms.
Ryanair has severely improved my life, especially for my fellow sun-deprived Northern Europeans.
[1] https://investor.ryanair.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ryan...
Those incidentals would not increase your fare 5-8 times. So that some passengers fall into the dark patterns cannot possibly make up for the price difference nor can the price difference to US be the base for your cost savings.
>nor can the price difference to US be the base for your cost savings Yeah I agree it's not perfect — but as someone who used to live in the US it's a base for me
[0] https://www.google.com/travel/flights/booking?tfs=CBwQAhpFEg...
40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, that's only $3 million/yr. If you've been at OpenAI for 10 years, you'll net more than that this year after they IPO.
It’s a polarizing idea, but frankly it’s what the world moves too and seem to work on the market. Some people are lazy or don’t have time and pay more money and some people have less time and dig through dark patterns, collect coupons or utilize ramp up subsidizing.
All those people that actually "work" through it will have less of a prime as if these patterns wouldn’t exist.
The question still remains would the world be a better place without these patterns,as it wastes time and acts against user intent.
It’s just a fascinating question to me, because a lot of things are not as simple as they seem of the first glance.
If regular lines would care to offer similar connections, I would gladly pay a bit more.
In the case of Ryanair, I think not using them often means that a casual weekend away could become a much bigger dent in my family's monthly budget.
You go through what seems the entire check-in process, you get what seems like a summary at the end, with a link to a UK government site where you need to go next to get a travel authorization, I spend an hour doing that, finally finish that, I show up to the airport the next morning to be told I'm not checked in, having to pay a hefty fee to do a late check-in for each of my five passengers. The staff at the airport isn't really Ryanair's, so recourse there. (As if having real Ryanair staff would have made a difference.)
Same trip, coming back, we wait in the central terminal building until our gate is published. We go over to the gate, one of our passengers being in a wheelchair, needing an elevator, which are out of service. Friendly airport staff help us with the long detour to get to our gate. By now the doors are closed, we missed our flight. Again, having to pay a hefty fee to rebook for each of my five passengers. This is Ryanair staff, still no recourse. (But plenty of contempt.)
I admit defeat, but my wife is still motivated to talk to customer support. This is months ago, I don't think that went anywhere either. They're mostly impenetrable.
I don't mind their baggage policies, it's a known thing that there's upsales every step of the way, that's baked in by now (pretty much across the industry). But there's still plenty deep-dark patterns left.
Thank goodness that we can vote with our feet, right, and just don't buy from them anymore. But guess what, we booked another flight for next month :)
This include never taking accountability when shit hits the fan.
- [1] https://youtu.be/Id-zzOGnN6A (Website part at 1:42 calling out the insurance example).
And I’ve saved thousands of pounds in flights around Europe over the years so can’t really complain
https://unhook.app/
If anything, RyanAir's strategy is to overexplain things, in hopes that people are unwilling to read what's on the screen and just click the first thing that advances the process
So this has nothing to do with where the code is, but that getting access to it requires malware.
I don't think this is a mistake, but something malicous clearly thought through.
Wonder if that could be a YouTube Channel