Avoid Ryanair's credit card fee by paying with Electropay

Anyone who has ever booked flights with Ryanair knows the frustration of the added fees that will increase the price substantially. I wrote a blog post about how to avoid Ryanairs credit card fees here and have now tried it. Even if it isn’t a completely free way of getting around the credit card fee, it is a highly recommended approach. The satisfaction of not paying the Euro 5 per passenger, per flight is extraordinary.

To avoid paying the hefty credit card fee that Ryanair imposes, you need to do the following.

Step 1 : Go to Entropays website, click here.

Step 2 : Sign up for Entropay by filling out a simple form. Please note, choose GBP as the account currency. This is the only way if you want Ryanair to recognise this virtual credit card as VISA Electron.

Step 3 : Give them the details of your standard credit card that you want to use to pay Electropay with.

Step 4: load your new virtual credit card with an amount, at least 10 GBP. The best way is to load the card with the exact amount that the flight cost.

You are now set to go. The signing-up only takes a few minutes. And once done, you can use it as many times as you want.

This is not a completely free service. They will charge you 4.95% of the amount you load the card with. For example, if you load Entropay with 10GBP, they will charge you 0.45 GBP. So of course, there is going to be a point where it will cost the same with Entropay as with Ryanair. This will be when you book a single journey for 1 passenger for EUR 101.01. So, if the fare is less than this, it will be cheaper with Entropay. How much cheaper will be depends on the price of the flight. The cheaper the flight, the higher the benefits of using Entropay.

When you book your flight on the Ryanair website, choose the VISA Electron option for paying. This is currently the only option there that is free. Of course, if you live in a country that offers a VISA Electron, you might opt for that one instead of the virtual way.

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• How to avoid paying Ryanair's credit card fees
• Ryanair's 250% increase in luggage fees
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• Why only one piece of hand luggage?

Ryanair's 250% increase in luggage fees

Image via Wikipedia

The low-cost carrier has done it again. They have made it to the headline with yet another incredulous announcement. The fees for checked-in luggage will rise steeply, in some cases up towards the 250% mark.

In an attempt to make passengers travel with hand-luggage only, Ryanair is raising all their fees for checked-in baggage. If you only carry hand-luggage, weighing less than 10 kilo, you will not notice any differences. However, if you want to check-in your bags, the following will now apply;

Checking in 1 bag online: will rise from €10 to €15 per flight from next month, a 50% increase.

Checking in 1 bag at the airport: will rise from €20 to €30 per flight from next month, a 50% increase.

In an attempt to profit further, Ryanair is doubling the checked-in baggage allowance for each passenger. From having allowed each passenger a weight allowance of only 15 kg, you can now bring with you 30 kilos, as long as no single bag weighs more than 15 kilos. A strange turnaround from an airline that says that they want to get rid of checked-in baggage.

Checking in 2^nd bag online: will rise from €20 to €35 per flight from next month, a 75% increase.

Checking in 2^nd bag at the airport: will rise from €20 to €70 per flight from next month, a 250% increase.

If you bag weighs too much, you will now have to pay even more for the extra kilos as the excess bag fee is being increased from €15 to €20 per kilo. So, do note that if you have more than 1 kilo too much, you are better off paying the 2^nd bag charge online.

If you are travelling with checked-in luggage, the other airlines start to look like a more appealing offer, and possibly even a cheaper one.

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• Budget airlines: Ryanair the European low-cost carrier
• Where to find cheap flights
• How to avoid paying Ryanair's credit card fees
• Why only one piece of hand-luggage?

How to avoid paying Ryanair’s credit card fees

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

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?

Related posts:

• Ryanair's 250% increase in luggage fees
• Budget airlines; Ryanair the European low-cost carrier.
• Where to find cheap flights.
• Why only one piece of hand luggage

Why only one piece of hand luggage?

This week I travelled on the low-cost airlines Ryanair and EasyJet. I assume that most of you have heard of these no-frills companies that make their money from anything but the flight fare itself. To avoid having to pay the hefty baggage fees, we all have to make do with the 10 kilo hand luggage that we are entitled to. This didn’t use to be an major problem as your 10 kilo will see you trough a long weekend but in order to, I can only assume, make even more money, these companies decided that these 10 kg could had to be contained in one single bag.

So, rather than having one bag with about 10 kg and then a laptop bag, a hand bag and the duty free bag, they now want us to fit all that into the one single bag. A nearly impossible task. I tell you, there were many travellers with open bags trying to re-pack and reshuffle their items. I wonder what the duty free shops think about this? Especially with us buying less than before as it is with the recession.

I often buy a drink and a book to enjoy on the plane. I used to have it in a separate little bag so that I could easily place my luggage in the overhead locker and then sit down and let the rest of the passengers find their seats. But not this time. Now I had to fit that into my already overcrowded bag and once in the plane, I then had to open the bag and search for the items that I wanted. That took a while and the queue got longer and longer as more people had to do the same. I wonder what Ryanair and Easyjet accomplished here. Any thoughts?

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