TAKE IT BACK!!

Has anyone out there flown with Ryanair before?

You know the old adage, "if it seems to good to be true, it probably is?"

Yeah, that's Ryanair.

The four of us flew from Zaragoza (a teeny-weeny airport) direct to Brussels, capital of Belgium and of the European Union, for peanuts. Really, it only cost us 200 Euros round-trip! Think about it: That's 50 Euros per person (about $70) to fly two hours. that includes taxes and landing fees. CHEAP!

Of course, they allow no free checked bags, allow one, strictly-defined carry on per person (if you have a camera, purse, book, whatever beyond your one bag, you can't CARRY it on the plane), and sell all consumables aboard including water. The seats also don't tilt back AT ALL, and there are no seat back pockets (nothing to put in them anyways). There are also no assigned seats. For an extra 10 Euros you can get "priority boarding" which allows you to get on the plane with the other "priority boarders" before the regular schmoes. They don't pre-board kids and babies either.
And if you don't print your own ticket, they charge you 30 Euros to print yours for you.

But hey, $70 round trip to Belgium!!!

Until there is a problem....

Like a volcano.

Who knew?

The day after we arrived in Brussels for a 4-day visit with Ximo's sister Carmen (who I realized I hadn't seen since I was in high school...as a student), the Brynjolfsson volcano sneezed ash all over northern Europe. I know it isn't really called that, but it's the only Icelandic word I know and, as an aside, was the longest word I could spell in first grade. Just ask my best friend at the time, Alan Brynjolfsson.

So our return flight was cancelled. No problem, right? Hundreds of thousands of people stranded, flights cancelled, all one has to do is to re-book the flight.

Hello, Ryanair.
Hello, Ryanair?
Hmm.........

Ryanair has a special customer service number to call if you need to talk to a person (call me crazy, but...). Oh yeah, to call costs 1 Euro PER MINUTE. Not that it matters, because for four days they didn't answer the phone.

I thought about going to the airport, but it was closed. So no one from Ryanair was there to see me either.

Which leaves the web site. www.ryanair.com is so complicated that I swear I once got to a page with nothing but a picture of the Minotaur, and to get back to the homepage I had to rip the battery out of my computer. The website told me, in very clear terms, that I had to change my flight because it had been "volcanoed." no problem.

Except that on Ryanair, once you print your tickets you can no longer change your flight. The page I ended up on told me to click on the "change flights" button on the left side of the page.

There were no buttons of any kind on the left side of the page.

Eventually I gave up, figured that "some day I'll find someone that actually works for Ryanair and get this part fixed" (even thinking this now makes me giggle a little), and I booked a brand new flight.

Which also got "volcanoed."

Unfortunately the "other flight," in addition to being cancelled, cost 240 Euros one-way. Funny how that works. In the end we found, at the last minute, a flight to a different city in Spain (Girona), and after 4 extra days in Brussels (which, by the way, were wonderful and I'll write about them TOMORROW) we flew out of northern Europe and back to Spain. Then allwe had was a 7-hour train ride home.

RENFE, the Spanish train company, lets you take as many bags as you want.

And their offices are staffed with real, smiling people.

Who will talk to you for free.