The Amazing Race 35, Episode 10

Stockholm (Sweden) - Dublin (Ireland)

[Map from FlightConnections.com of Ryanair routes to and from Dublin (DUB), including flights between Dublin and Stockholm Arlanda Airport (ARN).]

The unmentioned anti-hero of this episode of The Amazing Race 35 was the Dublin-based ultra-low-fare airline Ryanair.

In a product placement for the online travel agency Expedia, the cast members were told to make reservations for flights from Stockholm to Dublin on the Expedia smartphone app. For many years The Amazing Race was sponsored by Travelocity, another brand owned by Expedia. But Expedia has been phasing out Travelocity and some of its other brands, and has switched the name in which it sponsors The Amazing Race to “Expedia”.

The ability to “choose your own flight and hotel and make your own reservations” was touted as a benefit, but neither the racers nor viewers of the reality-TV show were told that Expedia doesn’t gives access to flights on every airline. Nor does any single Web site or app. You can choose your own flight through the Expedia app, but only from those flights Expedia is able, and chooses, to offer.

Many “low-cost” airlines save on their costs by not maintaining connections to computerized reservation systems or other reservation or payment systems used by online and offline travel agencies. As I’ve noted before, the extreme case is Ryanair, which for years has used every technical and legal means it can to prevent travel agents or any other third parties or intermediaries from reselling tickets for Ryanair flights.

If you do manage to buy a ticket for a Ryanair flight through a third-party Web site or app, Ryanair will consider you to have bought your ticket through a scalper, in violation of its conditions of carriage. If they can’t legally refuse to transport you, they will do everything they can to make your journey difficult. Earlier this year, for example, the European data protection watchdog nonprofit noyb (“None Of Your Business”), founded by Max Schrems, filed a complaint against Ryanair for requiring passengers who bought tickets through a third-party Web site to submit photos and copies of their passports in advance — even for flights within Europe for which EU citizens don’t need passports, only national ID cards or other evidence of citizenship — or show up at the airport more than two hours before scheduled departure.

Ryanair has sued numerous travel agencies and Web sites for selling tickets for Ryanair flights or displaying flight and/or fare information scraped from Ryanair’s site. In 2019, Expedia settled long-running litigation with Ryanair in both the USA and the European Union by agreeing to stop selling Ryanair tickets and remove any information about Ryanair flights from the Expedia Web site and app.

There’s a lot not to like about Ryanair — basically, almost everything except their extensive network of flights and their low base fares.

The viral hit Cheap Flights comedy sketch (also available here) by Fascinating Aïda is an over-the-top send-up of the extra fees that often make all-in prices on “low-fare” airlines no cheaper than prices on other airlines, notwithstanding low bare-bones (bait and switch?) base fares.

Ryanair takes a “you get what you pay for” attitude toward customer service and passengers’ rights to extremes, and has gotten into repeated trouble with European government regulators for refusing to compensate passengers as required by European Union law when it cancels flights. The racers all ended up on Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), which is the same airline I took to and from Iceland earlier this year. When SAS cancelled two of the four flights (SFO-CPH-KEF-CPH-SFO) on which I had bought tickets, and rebooked me on flights that required additional overnight layovers in Copenhagen and Reykjavik, I was eventually — although not without difficulty — able to get SAS to reimburse me in accordance with EU law. Ryanair d0oesn’t fly to Iceland, but if those flights had been on Ryanair, I might have had to go to small claims court to recover my expenses.

The one time I tried to buy a ticket on Ryanair — not because of price but because the schedule was the most convenient for my planned trip — their payment processing system failed when I clicked on “buy” on the Ryanair Web site. That’s not unusual with foreign credit cards. After being told, “We are unable to process this transaction”, I bought a ticket on another airline. What I didn’t expect was that, several hours after declining my offer to purchase a ticket, Ryanair would charge my credit card and then refuse to void or refund the charge. When I asked for documentation of the charge, Ryanair refused to provide any, in flagrant violation of both U.S. credit card law and Irish data protection law. I eventually got my money back form the bank that issued my credit card, but only after months of argument. And I suspect that Ryanair never paid back the bank and the bank had to absorb the loss. Moral of this story: Learn how to save screenshots of Web sites and apps, and always keep screenshots of purchases or failed purchase attempts as well as of terms and conditions of online purchases.

But the Ryanair group of airlines operates more flights and carries more passengers on more routes within Europe than any other airline (followed, for what it’s worth, by its “ultra-low-cost” competitors Easyjet and Wizz Air). Given that Ryanair is based in Dublin, it would be natural to consider Ryanair as a possibility if, like the cast of The Amazing Race 35, you were in a hurry to get to Dublin from almost anywhere in Europe.

Many Ryanair flights, including some of its flights to the Stockholm area, go to less convenient outlying airports. But as it happens, Ryanair’s Dublin-Stockholm flights go to Stockholm Arlanda Airport (ARN), the main Stockholm-area airport for long-haul flights. That’s a good thing for racers who were shown asking a taxi driver to take them to “Stockholm Airport” without specifying which airport they wanted.

Arlanda Airport isn’t the closest airport to central Stockholm. There’s a high-speed rail line between Stockholm Central Station and Arlanda, but the regular fare is SEK320 (US$28.50) one way, SEK600 (US$54) round-trip. When I arrived at Arlanda Airport late one night in May of this year, an Arlanda Express train had recently derailed, damaging more than a kilometer (!) of track. With service on the high-speed line suspended, getting from Arlanda Airport to the center of Stockholm by local trains took me more than two hours.

If you have a choice, Bromma Stockholm Airport is much closer to downtown and faster and cheaper to get to than any of the other Stockholm-area airports. It’s less than 8 km (5 miles) from the city center on the Tvärbana light-rail line. Bromma Airport is mostly a domestic airport for flights to and from the rest of Sweden, but also has some flights to and from other European countries.

Some flights on “low-cost” airlines, including some on Ryanair (although not their Dublin-Stockholm flights) and Wizz Air, go to Stockholm Skavsta Airport (NYO) in Nyköping or Stockholm Västerås Airport (VST). Despite using the name “Stockholm” for marketing purposes, each of these airports is more than 100 km (60 miles) from Stockholm, and neither has direct high-speed rail service. Buses between central Stockholm and either Skavsta or Västerås Airport take about 1 1/2 hours, barring traffic delays. You need to take the cost in time and money of getting to and from the airport into consideration in deciding whether a seemingly cheap flight to an airport like this is really a bargain.