Hello there!
Edit: I’m sure this post belongs in [email protected] because this post’s concern is with shilling facial recognition, promising benefits for it and overall describing it like the only sane option - “you wouldn’t want to stay in line for an hour, now, would you?”.
Just bought a Ryanair ticket that was, like, 17 euros. I saw that price and said “Wow! That’s like going to a movie but the movie is Slovakia!”. Bought the ticket, then received a looooot of spam, among which there was a letter saying that, since I bought from a third-party, I need to verify my identity first. On top there were 2 nice looking buttons that said “Verify Now” and above them there were two ways of verifying my identity enclosed in a nice frame. The first one would only take me 2 minutes and cost only 0.59 cents, and would utilize facial recognition technology,
Uses facial recognition technology. Verify in approx. 2 minutes. Requires a copy of the passenger’s identification documentation and a device with a camera.
the other one didn’t look so appetizing, because it might have taken up to 7 days (I’d be leaving in 4), it would have no cost (for free) and would use no facial recognition technology, hence the 7 day wait
Verifies the passenger’s signature. Verify within 7 days. Requires a copy of the passenger’s identification documentation and a device with a camera.
Following the two ways there was a third way, which was in no way highlighted as the first two, and it said that if I wanted, I could go there myself and hand them my passport, but they explicitly dissuade me from doing so because “it would imply a payment of a check-in fee”
Passengers who do not avail of Express Verification or Standard Verification to verify their bookings can verify at the Ryanair ticket desk up to 60 minutes before departure.
However, we do not recommend this option as an airport check-in fee will apply (please see our Table of Fees).
The facial recognition way sounded like an angel’s voice among the devil’s screams, when compared to the other two. It was presented almost like “an offer JUST for you”, like “Look. I normally don’t do this, but since you’re such a nice guy…”. I obviously discarded the facial-recognition way as soon as I read “facial recognition”, but also because they so strongly suggested against me paying 55 euros (I called and asked) to them. Now, if the 55 euros are going to Ryanair, it sounds so unreasonable for them to almost refuse taking my money [However, we do not recommend this option as an airport check-in fee will apply (please see our Table of Fees).]. Who doesn’t want an extra 55 from each old person that buys their ticket? I would, however, understand if that 55 were to go entirely to the airport, not Ryanair, but I don’t think that’s how it works (correct me if I’m wrong). It seemed like they wanted to own my face more than my 55 euros, so it must be that they would earn much more from my face than from my wallet. I don’t want to allow that. I assume that, when applying to the facial recognition option, I would need to accept a specific ToS allowing them to store and sell my pretty little face around. I can’t allow that. I also understand that this is a low-cost flight and they need to reach a certain earning with alternative methods (i.e. selling my face to third-party and whatnot), but since they allow to pay for the ticket AND the 55 for the check-in then that sum must cover the whole thing and it must be the non-low-cost full price. Why then would I sell you my face allowing you to use me to make much more money than you should? For the commodity of doing the verification from my couch in 2 minutes? That’s not enough for me to sell myself, and neither should it be for anyone else (who has some, if not pride, then self-respect).
The whole picture looks a bit manipulative to me and I’d rather waste the money I spent on the two-way ticket and airbnb, stay home and never have anything to do with Ryanair.
“None of your business” (NOYB) is already on it and complained to the data protection authorities.
For context - NOYB is the organization with Max Schrems, the guy who is constantly fighting Meta (and slowly winning)
Thank you. I’ll take a look at it, seems like a heartwarming movement
So besides all the (justified) Ryanair hate here… 3rd party ticket resellers are also scum and you should never use them.
I haven’t bought a Ryanair ticket in a while, but on their own website it is AFAIK “just” the usual dark pattern trying to upsell you BS you don’t need.
I wouldn’t have bought it from a third-party, my not-so-tech-savvy wife did. Thanks for the warning though
yeah man thats nuts… satanic black magic- sick shit!
honestly you could have just gone to the ryanair website and gotten another ticket for 17 and not done any of this
I don’t know if there are European regulations that prevent it but I could see the cancellation fee being like 25€, lol.
oh no, you’d just buy another one. I recently bought a ryanair flight and then realized I’d have to come back earlier, so I just got another ticket. The fee to change your flight was €50, but the flight was €19
Ah OK, so the cancellation/change fee is the price of the new ticket, haha.
more. more than 2x the cost of a new ticket, its wild. you’d figure they’d want to be able to resell the other one at a higher fare closer to the flight time, but I guess not
I don’t think it’s necessarily a third-party reseller thing. I bought tickets a few days ago literally from their app, only to get the same email that said I needed to ‘verify my identity’ because I bought the tickets for an ‘unauthorized third-party reseller’.
Absolutely. My friends and I just flew with Ryanair from Rome to Barcelona, and besides almost losing my mobile boarding pass because I almost lost my phone, it was completely fine. I’ve heard a lot of things about them strictly enforcing luggage sizes, so I just made sure I only bought the tickets through the official website while ignoring the upselling dark patterns and got bags I knew would absolutely fit the stricter luggage requirements.
Given the alternatives were either Wizz, Lufthansa, or Easyjet for a direct flight, I think I made the right decision.
I always buy from third party. Cheapair accepts cryptocurrency.
I’ve had many terrible past experiences with my payment failing with a credit card, most likely due to false positive fraud detection systems (I do a lot of things to protect myself on the internet)
I’ll never buy a flight again with fiat. Cryptocurrency is push-based and permissionless, so they couldn’t block my payment even if they wanted to. It works every time.
But unless you’re paying with Monero, you paying with cryptocurrency is not private at all. Idon’t know a lot about cryptos but I’ve heard blockchain is even more traceable than fiat and even less private as paying with cash.
This is payment for a flight. I don’t need it to be private or anonymous. But I do need it to let me pay.
I do know a lot about cryptocurrency. IMHO the most important features are that they are permissionless and push-based.
This makes them more secure and unblockable.
If I wanted anonymity, I’d pay with Monero. But that doesn’t matter for a flight that requires me to auth with my passport…
You can always go through a non-kyc exchange, buy monero for anything, send to another non-kyc exchange, sell monero for eth, withdraw to a fresh wallet, boom, privacy
So the trip is not 17 euros, but 72 euros without
graciasface recognition. Quite deceiving!Edit: lol I meant face, not gracias 😆
Granted, they weren’t going to Spain so it wasn’t quite as big a deal.
Trying to push it as standard seems like it
Low-cost entry point products (including low-cost airline tickets) will be at the forefront of corporate bullshittery and privacy concerns for a long time.
Thanks to OP for pointing this one out. The best we can do is hope for good awareness and changes coming from that (and obviously, for those with the means for bigger changes, please speak up).
You get what you pay for.
Sorry OP, but as someone who worked in the industry, I have run out of sympathy with people who fly ryanair.
It’s not like it’s a state secret that they’re scum.
You get what you pay for.
Yuck
There’s no law stating cheap stuff has to be shit, it’s just an assumption based on market ideology
No one’s twisting RyanAir’s arm to be dickheads
If it’s that cheap, though, it just has to be shit. It’s just not realistic, otherwise
Again, that’s just market ideology speaking
It’s Mathematics, specifically Statistics.
There is also a natural human psychological factor - demonstrated by Behavioural Economists with actual experiments - of when facing with multiple choices one is unfamiliar with presuming that the cheapest has some problem and going for the 2nd cheapest.
There is a lot of Free Market ideology shit, but this specific element actually goes against it (as in, it’s the opposite of how the homo economicus model behaves).
If you’re going to throw that stuff around at least inform yourself rather than parrot it as a mindless slogan.
when facing with multiple choices one is unfamiliar with presuming that the cheapest has some problem and going for the 2nd cheapest.
presuming
If there was a study that proved all cheaper items were actually inferior, it would prove the presumption correct. But this study does not prove that.
It only proves what I said - that people presume cheaper items are worse.
EDIT: I’m not saying cheaper items aren’t often worse. They often are. But it is not a general rule. Many more expensive items have inflated prices, leaving room beneath them for more honestly priced items of similar quality.
They’re 2 different things:
Exceptionally cheaper items are often inferior.
However there is also an irrational human behaviour of expecting the cheapest item (even just slightly so) in a range of otherwise similar choices to be inferior.
Whilst the first situation does have a Statistical backing (in that the so-called “too good to be true” situations more often than not are indeed so), the second - which is a much more general cognitive shortcut around pricing - does not (as you pointed out) have any real Statistical backing.
The first feeds the second. It’s the same mechanism as stereotyping.
No. You’re generalizing something while we were talking about a specific case. 17$ for a plane ticket is just not feasible, when you account all the costs associated with flying. In this specific case, there has to be something wrong somewhere. It’s not an abstract theory, it’s just numbers not adding up.
You’re only guessing, just as I am. Until we can see an actual price breakdown of their tickets, it remains a guess.
No one’s twisting RyanAir’s arm to be dickheads
No one’s twisting consumers’ arms to be dickheads by buying products or services from unethical companies. People know ryanair flouts labour laws, treats passengers like shit, and that air travel is destroying the planet. Just like people know cheap fast fashion made in Myanmar or China has quite likely been (in part) made with slave/child labour.
I’m not pretending to be a saint, but why should people who don’t give a shit about others, expect the rest of us to give a shit about them? What goes around comes around.
It’s not that different to someone some rich Saudi complaining about their slave spitting in their food. I mean, sucks for you, but I’ve run out of tiny violins Marie Antionette.
A lot of people are in for a very rude awakening as the climate crisis worsens and the global order changes.
Now me and everyone who I ranted to know it. I never had anything to do with Ryanair or airplanes in general before
The problem is… I’ve now placed Lufthansa on my scum list after two terrible customer service experiences with their idiotic policies. And I paid way more than I would have with Ryanair
Try Air France, they are seriously good.
Went to Denmark, no luggage (only cabin), got an email the day before leaving saying there were place so I could have a check-in luggage for free.
They’ll let you take an earlier plane if there is room.
No cabin luggage BS.
And they serve a little “meal” even on shorter flights.
That’s my experience anyway.
Wouldn’t this be illegal as there seemed to by mandatory additional fees that were not disclosed as you purchased the ticket?
They aren’t mandatory as there is a free option
I agree, but since there also is paid option as well, they should have specified it. Found out about the extra fee only when called the call-center when the ticket was bought.
It was probably specified somewhere in a hidden directory like “/.ohandbytheway/whyyouarenotgoindtosleepwithaaslovakianprostitute.txt”, not indexed in the website
RyanAir is (in)famous for this type of shit. E-tickets are used everywhere, but RyanAir forces you to have your ticket printed on paper or on their own mobile app. If you don’t, you’ll pay 20+ Euros for the employee at the check-in to print it for you. I think these ludicrous fees are meant more as “fines” than revenue.
Whether you like RyanAir or not (and I don’t like them much), they are good at keeping their prices low by cramming as many people as they can on each flight as quickly as possible. This means disincentivizing anything that can waste them a few seconds per passenger, be it additional baggage (the base ticket now has no baggage at all, except for a small bag or backpack that can be placed under the seat) or, I guess, checking someone’s identity at check-in.
Nice! My permit to stay in my home country (I’m an immigrant) expires the day after I fly back, so if they don’t allow me on board exactly when I booked - I’m not going back home and staying in Slovakia 👽
Well in terms of certainty of flying, RyanAir is not worse than other companies. If anything they are a bit better, as I don’t think they overbook flights like other companies do and (by generally flying to secondary airports) they tend to be less affected by delays/congestion. I wish you good luck with your flight!
I find ryanair much more reliable than say Wizzair, who seems to be late everytime I use them, sometimes even hours. I think Ryanair strategy is to sell you a 20 euro ticket, and then get more money out of you by all kinds of moves. So if you have a bit of experience you can fly cheaply, if not, you will learn and pay more.
When you go to check in online, I bet you can just put your passport number in the web form and that should be fine. I also seriously doubt they are going to charge you to show your passport at the ticket desk, but I haven’t flown Ryanair recently so who knows.
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won’t work, if you buy over a reseller.
Noted 👍
When I visited the US back in 2019 there were these facial recognition stations that compared your face with your passport. I think that was in England but I’m not sure.
They fucking sucked. Absolutely useless. Privacy concerns aside, they just didn’t work. Apparently I’m not me.
I’m UK based, and fly semi regularly. Those booths are great, at least for me. They’ve not failed for me so far. They also seem to be at least 90% effective, which speeds things up vastly. Your passport needs to have the biometric features available however. A lot of people get confused when their passport lacks them.
I always just refuse them. The flight people are in a hurry and don’t want to argue when you say can’t a human do this faster?
I was travelling within EU(from EU country, to another EU country) and in the layover airport, i was forced to go through facial recognition/passport check. This has happened only once and i think it was in France(CDG) or maybe Germany. And if i werent an EU citizen, i would literally have to go through a manual passport check, with long lines.
To be fair, i rarely go through CDG and i never have any issues with german layover airports(which i have used dozens of times), which is why i think it was CDG.
I have a US passport and did multiple trips to the schengen area over the past year. The airport staff always makes me go to the passport scanning machines despite me telling them that it will reject me for being too complicated. They won’t let me go directly to the manual line so I have to wait in the machine line, get rejected, and then wait in the manual line.
A terrorist for sure
There are counters and automated terminals in UK passport control, I’ve never had much issue with the automated ones. The queue builds up for the manual checking counters pretty easily.
So did you read the ToS? I’m assuming GDPR would prevent selling such data without consent.
Unfortunately, GDPR doesn’t prevent such things. It just punishes violators (if they get caught).
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😔 sadly the bar is so low we can only hope for them not to violate our rights without consent.
For ePassport, your biometric data is loaded into it, including your photo.
The day will come when they will take what they want, it’s just a matter of how long does it take to boil the frog
I think this is just Ryanair trying to discourage 3rd party ticket sales more than anything else. They have always been very hostile towards that option. Of you want to fly Ryanair, buy directly from them, from my experience the prices are the same anyways and there’s no face id required.
As for the €55 airport check-in fee, that definitely goes to Ryanair. They are just famous for trying to extract as much money post-sale as possible. It has nothing to do with the identification, it’s just Ryanair not having free check-in on airport. I don’t think your face has €55 value to them, it’s the other way around. Using the airport check-in is kind of last resort option (for example when you didn’t do the online check-in on time) and they know that customer would be in desperate enough situation to pay that much to fly.
This can happen for tickets booked through Ryanair website too. I was recently asked to do it and I don’t use 3rd party booking websites.
Interesting. I wonder what were the circumstances. The wording on their page is quite vague as for when they’d might require this identification:
Where a booking appears to have been made through a third-party travel agent who has no commercial relationship with Ryanair
I generally avoid Ryanair where I can, but I flew with them many times before and never had this issue. They were one of the first airlines I encountered that required login to purchase tickets, so this is all in line with their behavior.
They are like a monkey with an automatic weapon that they can use to do stuff to others, but they’re not yet sure how and when they are gonna do it
Just in general, discount airlines are always better to book directly through the website because they will give you options to bundle upgrades much cheaper during that initial purchase than later on. It is often like $75 for a seat upgrade, checked bag and priority boarding, vs $70 just for the bag if you do it later on.
If I actually decide to go, I think I’ll pay that 55, so that they can have them until they spend them on doritos the following day, but letting them have my face would make them money even the next day and the day after that. Does that sound reasonable? A 55 for me, in this case, is a payment for intel (albeit an undesired one), like in hitman: blood money, to know who is the enemy and who is the friend
I recently bought a ticket. I check flights through 3rd party (kiwi) but always buy directly (dont feel like uploading my ID to some website) and it did not ask for anything. I think this is the way they fight the resellers? They check your identity before boarding so what is the point?
Nevermind, they cancelled my flight today and thus made my decision-making more straightforward. The problem is still there tho
