How to avoid paying Ryanair’s credit card fees

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Ryanair is one of the world’s cheapest airlines. This low-cost airlines offers amazing value tickets for flights within Europe, starting at € 0. However, as always there is a snag. You will have to fork out substantially more than the flight price to actually be able to book the ticket. If you do decide that you don’t need much luggage and that the handbag allowance of one bag is sufficient, you will still need to pay to check-in. On top of that, you will have to pay a credit card fee unless you are the lucky holder of a VISA Electron. In the end, the free ticket could cost you a good bit more than you expected.

So, is there a way of getting around this? Well, if you could get your hands on a VISA Electron card which Ryanair doesn’t charge for using, I’d say; go for it. However, that seems to get increasingly hard to do so, especially if you are an adult. There is another option that I have heard about but not yet tried . It won’t be free, but it will cost you less than the €5 single fare credit card fee that Ryanair charge you if the ticket price is low.

Entropay is a company that offers virtual credit cards for a small fee. This fee is currently 4.95% of the amount you load your virtual card with. If you only load it with €10, the fee will be €0.495. As I haven’t used it myself, I can’t vouch for it to actually work but plenty of people swears by it. There is a snag though. When you choose your account currency, you need to pick GBP. That is the only way at the moment to get Ryanair to pick up on this card as a VISA Electron. So, once you have signed up to Entropay and created your virtual credit card, you need to pick VISA Electron when you are paying Ryanair and they credit card fee should be € 0.

Has anyone heard of this before or tried it?

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