Flour Power

Ryanair announced it will open its 33rd base at Porto. The base will have 2 new aircraft and 4 new routes. This represents an investment of $140 million (about €100 million) and will increase Ryanair’s traffic at Porto to 1.5 million passengers per year, which will sustain 1.500 jobs.

Basel, Eindhoven, St Etienne and Tours are the 4 new routes, and along with the doubling of flights to Paris Beauvais (to twice daily), Ryanair will be offering 50 daily return flights to/from Porto.

And to celebrate:

Ryanair celebrated its new Porto base, two new aircraft, 16 routes and 1.5 million passengers by releasing 1 million €9 seats for travel across its European network for travel in late August, September and October which are available for booking on www.ryanair.com until midnight Sunday (5^th July).

Now what I want to ask now is: what about Lisbon?! Get those open minded flight attendants to the capital as well…

This should be very interesting for those who have the fetish of hooking up with a flight attendant (every single guy?). Edita Schindlerova, who works from Ryanair’s base in Stansted, has an unusual hobby. The 22 year old from Czech Republic is a movie star in her free time. Her screen name is Edita Bente and she participates in adult movies. As an actress. True story!

According to The Sun (watch out for some NSFW content), a Ryanair spokesman said that what she does after hours has nothing to do with when she’s thousands of feet above the ground: “What people do before or after they work for us is their business”.

I bet that from now on a lot of people will be really excited whenever they fly through Stansted. I would like to see statistics on the new bookings on the Stansted – Brno route…

Anyway, if you’re expecting some pictures or videos, I won’t post them here. This is a serious blog after all. (Hint: just Google her name…)

Edita is also part of Ryanair’s 2009 Calendar, as the face (and everything else) for February:

Starting in October, Ryanair check-in will be 100% online. This will allow all passengers, including those travelling with checked baggage, to check-in online and avoid queues and delays at airport check-in desks. The so-called ”drop desks” will be available for those passengers with checked luggage to drop it before proceeding through airport security to the boarding gate.

The move to 100% web check-in will be phased as follows:

1. From 19^th March 2009, Ryanair’s web check-in service will be extended to (a) non EU/EEA citizens, (b) passengers travelling with checked baggage and (c) reduced mobility customers. Customers choosing web check-in and travelling with only carry-on bags will continue to enjoy this service free of charge. A web check-in fee of £5/€5 per person/per flight will apply to passengers travelling with checked baggage, while customers who wish to use airport check-in will be charged an airport check-in fee of £10/€10 per person/per flight at the time of booking.
2. From 1^st May 2009 all new bookings will be required to use web check-in, and the use of traditional airport check-in desks will be phased out over the summer months. The web check-in fee of £5/€5 per person, per flight will apply to all new bookings (except promotional fares) from 1^st May 2009. In order to dissuade passengers from using airport check-in desks, the fee for airport check-in will double to £20/€20 per person/per flight at the time of booking.
3. From 1st October 2009 airport check-in desks will no longer be available at any Ryanair airport. All passengers will be required to web check-in and those who have checked in bags will use the airport “bag drop” desks, if required. From this date, children under the age of 16 will no longer be able to travel unaccompanied and passports and national ID cards will be the only accepted forms of photo ID on Ryanair flights.

My question here is, how much difference will this make? How much better will it be? If you think about it, you’ll still have to stand in a queue for the “bag drop” desks. The bags will still need to be weighted. The Ryanair clerk will still need to place the luggage identification thingie on the bags. Doesn’t this take the same amount of time than regular check-in? Or saving a few seconds per passenger (that’s probably how long it takes to type a reservation ID and printing out the boarding pass) is really that significant?

I guess it must be, or else they wouldn’t be doing this move. But I’d like to see some numbers to support it. Or maybe Ryanair just wants to stand out as the first airline to do it, and it’s mostly about the publicity. They say that the web check-in is already used by 75% of their passengers, anyway.

I’m just hoping that this makes the prices drop. With all the taxes, fees and surcharges, Ryanair is not as low-cost as it was before. They’re even having a competition to choose the next discretionary charge, with a cash prize of €1.000. How ridiculous is that?