Masochists Get Their Dream Flight
April 17th, 2007 Posted in Travel bargains, Vacation deals
Last week RyanAir announced they would begin flying across the Atlantic Ocean, with flights starting at just $12. Since this is about what you would pay for a bare-bones Chinatown bus from New York to Boston, “you get what you pay for” will take on a whole new meaning.
I’m all for bargain basement flights when it’s a couple of hours in the air. But a flight between Europe and North America is trying in coach under normal circumstances. Add the usual RyanAir signatures- no legroom, seats that don’t lean back, payment required to even get some water, and very restrictive baggage weights - and a six-hour flight is going to feel like a long weekend in hell. That’s assuming everything goes right. What if you’re stuck on the tarmac for two hours on top of it? What if you’re flying backwards too?
Quite a few travel writers have weighed in on this already, including on the Perceptive Travel Blog, and Gadling. One thing I haven’t seen addressed anywhere is, how safe is it to be crammed in that close for that many hours? Whatever happened to the worries about deep vein thrombosis? This seems like a guaranteed way to up your chances of getting it.
There’s frugal, there’s cheap, and then there’s bad spending decisions to save a buck. I know flights across the Atlantic are steep, especially during the summer, but this doesn’t seem like the answer. RyanAir’s transatlantic sardine cans won’t happen for a while though, so we’ll see how it pans out for real when it’s more than just talk. We can use Zoom’s 129-pound (including taxes) flights launching this summer as the canary in the coal mine.
