Great News For The Wallets Of Ryanair Passengers

Alana Laverty

Fab news today as Ryanair announce not one, but two new ways they’ll be helping us passengers out going forward.

As part of the airline’s ‘Always Getting Better’ programme, it was today announced checked bag sizes will increase and fees will be reduced.

This aims to encourage more customers to check in bags and reduce the number of customers with two bags at the boarding gates.

As too many customers are availing of Ryanair’s improved 2 free carry-on bags service, and with high load factors (97% in August) there is not enough overhead cabin space for this volume of carry-on bags, which is causing boarding/flight delays.

To encourage more customers to check-in some bags and reduce the volume of carry-on bags, Ryanair will introduce the following bag policy changes on all flights from 1 November next:

The check-in bag allowance will increase from 15kg to 20kg for all bags
The standard check-in bag fee will be cut from €35 to €25 for a 20kg bag
Only Priority Boarding customers (including Plus, Flexi Plus & Family Plus) will be allowed to bring two carry-on bags on the aircraft*
All other (i.e. non-priority) customers will only be allowed to bring one smaller carry-on bag on board the aircraft, while their second (bigger) wheelie bag must be placed in the hold (free of charge) at the boarding gate.

“These bag policy changes will cost Ryanair over €50m p.a. in reduced checked bag fees. However, we believe offering bigger bags at reduced fees will encourage more customers to consider checking-in a bag, which will reduce the high volume of customers we have with 2 carry-on bags at the boarding gates, which is causing flight delays due to large numbers of gate bag and cabin bag offloads.

We hope that by restricting non-priority customers to one small carry-on bag – their wheelie bag must be placed in the hold, free of charge at the boarding gate – this will speed up the boarding of flights and eliminate flight delays being caused by not having sufficient overhead cabin space on busy flights to accommodate over 360 (182 customers x 2 bags) carry-on bags.

These lower bag fees and increased bag size allowances will come into play for all bookings for travel after 1^st November, and we hope our customers will enjoy the savings of our new simplified bag policy.”

Kenny Jacobs, Ryanair

* Priority Boarding can be purchased for just €5 at the time of booking or added to a booking for €6 and is available up to one hour prior to scheduled departure.

This will make lives, and travelling, a lot easier that’s for sure.