price of a barrel of oil goes to $148. Take the cheap option and park your excess aircraft at airports in the wintertime. Be sued by President Nicolas Sarkozy over a press advertisement featuring his wife-to-be. See XL Airways go bust. Continue to criticise the BAA ‘Britain’s Awful Airports’. Maintain an average fare of €44. Employ 5,200 staff and fly 58,000,000 passengers using 163 aircraft.
2009 etc.
More of the same. See above, ad nauseum. Specifically, annoy the hell out of everyone else. Retire.
THE IN-LAW FARES AIRLINE
Rod Stewart may be about to pledge ‘for richer for poorer’ as he weds Penny Lancaster. But the famously skinflint rocker, 62, isn’t about to let costs go sky-high—as he has made his kids take a no-frills budget flight to the bash in Italy. Daughter Ruby, 20, joked as they boarded the Ruinair jet at Stansted: ‘We should all take it in turns to stand up at the end of the wedding and say my dad’s really cheap!’
THE MIRROR
THE LAW FARES AIRLINE
Ruinair is the choice of actor Jude Law, who was heading for an Easter holiday break with his kids. A few months ago he claimed he was broke after a pricey divorce settlement with his ex-wife Sadie Frost. ‘I lost everything in order to get the right to visit my children. My bank account is therefore almost always empty.’
WWW.CELEBRITY-GOSSIP.NET
THE LOW BLAIRS AIRLINE
Tony Blair gave budget travellers a shock when he boarded their low-cost flight back to London at the end of a week-long Italian holiday. Blair and a seven-member entourage flew from Rome on a commercial flight with no-frills carrier Ruinair, according to Rome’s Ciampino airport. The prime minister has drawn unwelcome attention from British newspapers in the past for using more costly state flights for holiday trips abroad. Ruinair’s press office could not immediately say how much Blair paid for his ticket. After all other passengers boarding the Stansted-bound Boeing 737 had been double-checked by security, Mr Blair’s party was ushered to specially-reserved seats at the front of the plane. The flight left the Rome airport 25 minutes late following the additional security checks. Showing his thirst for budget travel had its limits, Blair was met on the London airstrip by a limousine. A passenger said. ‘We only paid £49 for our tickets so, assuming he did the same, he must have saved the country a fortune.’
REUTERS
Ruinair Flight FR206 – Tuesday @ 8.30am – DUB-STN-DUB
Fare €2 plus taxes, fees and charges €42
Ruinair have a proud history of stopping passengers. In 2003 they refused boarding to ‘IT girl’ and Bollinger babe Tara Palmer Tomkinson because she did not have a required passport, despite travelling on an internal flight within the UK. She forgot IT. Apparently she retorted, ‘Do you know who I am?’ She was lucky not to suffer the fate of a us domestic passenger who once shrieked the same riposte, before a check-in agent used a public address system to speak to the entire Departures terminal: ‘May I have your attention please. We have a passenger here who does not know who he is. If anyone can help him find his identity, please step forward to this counter.’ Also in 2003 they refused boarding to Jeremy Beadle, much to the relief of the other passengers on the flight. They stopped Marian Finucane, one of Ireland’s best known media personalities, because she had no ID. They refused boarding to a John O’Donoghue on a flight from Cork to Dublin because he did not have any picture ID and he was the Irish government’s Minister for Tourism. They stopped ‘Iron Mike’ Tyson from boarding a Gatwick to Dublin flight because he arrived late. The brutal, aggressive yet floored Tyson was quoted as saying, ‘As long as I am not too late, then it’s okay.’
But I am not truly convinced. Ruinair flew the oldest football in the world from Glasgow Prestwick to Hamburg Lubeck to take pride of place at a World Cup exhibition in Hamburg. Checking in under the name of Mr A. Football, the sixteenth-century pig’s bladder, reputed to have been kicked about by Mary Queen of Scots at her weekly five-a-side game in Linlithgow, travelled in a specially designed box, had its own seat and I am told selected a pizza and Bovril from the in-flight menu. I am sure that ball had no passport. I always heed Mick’s advice. ‘On the photo identification, we are sorry for the old people who do not have a passport, although it only applies between Ireland and the United Kingdom, but our handling people are in an impossible position. We cannot include old age pension books as a form of identification when we are dealing with sixteen different countries coming through Stansted. The handling people on the ground simply cannot handle it. It has to be very simple, which is the reason we require a passport, driving licence or the international student card. We do not want the university student card or the Blockbuster video card.’
Never engage Ruinair check-in staff in voluntary conversation for fear they find an obscure reason to deny boarding. ‘Sorry sir, that couldn’t possibly be you in that awful passport photograph.’ Today is not the day to naively ask for a good window seat near the front and see their reaction. Be conscious of the small print they put on page 173 of their standard email confirmation. This states the following. ‘Look mate, no matter what happens at any stage in this flight, it’s your own fault not ours, so don’t ever try to mess with us.’ I worry they will get me soon at check-in. They get us all eventually. I will be late. I will have no ID. I will forget the email confirmation. The check-in queue will be too long. I will not have shaved. They won’t like my jumper. Some braver folk dice with death and bring a Post-it note with their confirmation reference. But I always bring along my emailed itinerary so I can show the check-in girl that I only paid one euro.
Ruinair weigh passenger checked luggage as carefully as the us Department of the Treasury weigh gold bars leaving the Fort Knox Bullion Depository in Kentucky. I watch other passengers on their knees on the floor, opening suitcases and dividing their life’s possessions into heavy items and not-so-heavy items, all being somewhat reminiscent of that U2 song ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’. Someone spots an unused check-in desk with a weighing scales so others check the weight of their baggage with fingers crossed, but the cashiers who double as check-in agents are not happy that the rabble are using the scales. A reading of 15 kg on the red display is joy; 16 kg is despair. ‘She wants to charge me for one feckin’ kilo over.’ The guy ahead with a huge suitcase is about to be badly screwed until the cashier asks him to weigh his backpack which is a tiny 2 kg. He moves about 5 kg of dirty laundry from suitcase to backpack and so avoids excess baggage charges but holds us up for ages and all his baggage is still going in the aircraft, whether it’s in the hold or the overhead bin, and all their petty baggage rules suddenly seem so pointless.
I heard a rumour that Ruinair may introduce charges for customers who travel with emotional baggage, in an attempt to avoid delays caused by family arguments at check-in and at boarding. They will have a strict rule of ‘maximum of one divorce case per passenger’ with no pooling of cases allowed. So if a mother turns up at the airport with her children from a first marriage, and she is still not talking to her second husband, the check-in girl will ask her a series of questions about the divorce and all the suppressed anger and guilt felt by the family, and Ruinair will charge her an extra
