HELP!!! London-Stansted Airport/Ryanair
 

My friends and I are leaving for Europe tomorrow. In reading Ryanair's policy, I am growing more concerned about our flight next week (Rome-London-Barcelona)

*We will be arriving London-Stansted from Rome at 11:45 am
*Our flight from London-Stansted to Barcelon (Girona) is scheduled to leave at 12:40 pm

Unfortunatley, the next flight is not until 5:45 pm. Is this connection too tight? Ryanair says they close their check-in desks 40 minutes prior to departures - that appears to only give us 15 minutes to grab our luggage from luggage claim & get checked in. Anyone have any advice? Should I change our flight out of London?

I think that if you change your flights, Ryanair charge you the difference between what you originally paid and the current price, plus an admin fee. Depending upon what your original flight cost, it might not be much more expensive to just hope for the best and buy a brand new ticket if you miss your connection. It's going to be really tight though, even if your first flight arrives on time.

I think this kind of post is good reading for any conteplating doing a connection - - in any sense of thre word on Ryanair. We faced the same difficult question for Geaz-Stansted/Stansted-Prestwick. We had four choices: buy tickets for about60 minutes later, 2:15 later, 3:30 later or 4:30 later (scheduled arrival from Graz at 16:45 as I recall). I couldn't decide what to do, and ultimately decided to just overnight near Stansted, and take the early morning departure the next day.

And as if to vindicate our decision, Ryanair subsequently sent us a notice of schedule change - - our arrival from Graz will now be (scheduled!) almost an hour later.

The take-home lesson perhaps should be - - find some way to use the time in Englan (or Ireland or wherever) if you plan to do a "connection" on Ryanair from anywhere to anywhere.

I am still (so far - - based on two flights in 1999) a big fan of the airline, but I think there are important things to be aware of.

Best wishes,

Rex

Same goes for any of the low cost carriers in Europe - we learnt that lesson the hard way in the early days of Easyjet! They don't guarantee the connection and are within their rights to insist you buy another ticket without a refund on the other one (though Easyjet did transfer us without charge.) Also remember that Ryanair don't exactly have the best reputation for customer service so I wouldn't expect much help if things do go wrong.

Back from using Ryanair three times in a short period, into and out of Stansted - - and clearly it bears re-iterating: allow plenty of time to catch any flight departing Stansted. I saw more than a handful of angry travelers who were trying to check in at 35-38 minutes before departure (having landed there on another flight), and being told that the flight was closed (for check in) at 40 minutes pre-takeoff on the dot.

And though I remain a fan of Ryanair and Stansted (we got particularly good car rental service there), I don't remember the vigorous attempts to sell over-priced beverages on the flight 4 years ago. They offer NO water to drink, other than bottled (still) water at 1.60 GBP. Not pushy about asking you to buy it - - just no other choice, even on a 2 hour long flight (Graz to Stansted).

But then, why should anything different be expected? Neither do the trains.