[jorvi]

Percentage-wise, budget operators don’t really skimp that much on things like seat pitch compared to mid-tier operators.

The way RyanAir operates is with dark patterns. They have very strict luggage rules. Everything is optional. Their booking has ambiguous wording, causing less-savvy flyers to purchase options they don’t need. They sell RyanAir lottery tickets (!) on flights.

It’s like playing a game that is solely fueled by cosmetic microtransactions. If you can/know to not give in to the various trappings, you get to play a good game for free. Except in this case the game is air travel and the win condition is extremely cheap airfare :)

[AmericanChopper]

I’m not sure I would call it a dark pattern, it’s the stated goal of the product. To remove as many expenses as possible, and turn as many things into paid options as they can. They don’t make any effort to hide this and the RyanAir CEO talks about it publicly all the time.

They’re no different from a lot of other budget airlines. The seat pitch is as low as it can go, the seats are cheap and uncomfortable regardless of pitch, and everything other than the seat is a paid extra.

I had to take a reasonably long Air Asia flight last year, and the worst part about it was they woke you up every two hours by turning all the lights on and making a very long announcement that the duty free cart was going to spend the next hour trying to sell liquor and terrible perfume to every passenger.

However on that same flight, one of the paid options was for an incredibly cheap add on that gave you priority checkin, priority boarding, priority immigration, and priority baggage. It was like $10 or something, insanely good value.