The real cost of low fare air travel

Sitting in an airport terminal at 11:30pm, I suddenly had an epiphany. Booking a £50 return flight (via Ryanair) to Dublin from London is all well and good, but that glee can fade. And quickly. Getting to Dublin, our flight was delayed an hour from London Stansted. I had gotten up at 6:15am and arrived at the airport for 9:30am to catch a flight for 11:10am. But at 10am word came from on high that the flight was delayed until 12:30pm. We didn’t get into Dublin until 2pm.

But this was a minor blip compared to the return journey. Ryanair closes the gates 20 minutes before a flight takes off. As I mentioned, it was raining all that afternoon, so we scrambled to get to the airport by 6:30pm for our 8:10pm flight. Fifteen minutes later—and a minor kerfuffle regarding Erika’s non-European passport—our flight was delayed until 9:20pm. That’s a delay of 2 hours. This was dismaying not only on principle but because of my circumstances: my iPod was long out of batteries (that’s what a 7 hour trans-Atlantic flight and a jaunt to the Emerald Isle will do to your battery) and I hadn’t brought a book. All I had with me was the latest issue of Toronto Life (which is amazing, by the way. There’s a feature on a cheating website which is outstanding!) To keep ourselves occupied we took our sweet time going through security, rummaged through Duty Free very thoroughly and absolutely meandered to the gate. It was only 7:30pm. After reading for a little while, I headed to the Internet kiosk to check three days worth of emails.

When I got back 15 minutes later, the flight had been delayed to 11:30pm! I did not take it well. Leaving at 11:30 meant we wouldn’t get back to London until 12:30am. Then there was still the hour and a half bus ride to central London—and we didn’t know if the buses would be running that late at night. That’s when my epiphany occurred and I realized the true cost of budget airlines. Sure the flight was only £50, but it was now three hours late. I still had to get home and no idea how that would happen. For all I knew I’d have to stay in Stansted for the night take another bus home or pay a taxi.

By this time, Erika and her boyfriend had left to pick up McDonalds (because it was located in Arrivals, they had to go through customs and security twice) and I was rationing my Toronto Life. To add insult to injury, a later flight to Stansted left at 10:30, right in the gate we were due to leave from. When Erika came back, it was almost time to head to our new gate which was done in the basement of the airport.

At 11pm we began lining up facing several Ryanair jets—put there, I’m sure, to taunt us. We didn’t board until past midnight and because of strong winds we didn’t leave until 1am, Monday morning. Exhausted we hustled through the airport and lucky for us there was a 24 hour bus downtown; then I took a taxi (which a nice man wouldn’t let me pay for) home. All told, I didn’t get to the residence until 4am. I should also mention at this point that I was moving back to residence. So I arrived to an empty room, in the middle of the night. Exhausted as I was, I changed into my PJs threw the cover-less duvet on the sheet-less bed, lay my head on the pillowcase-less pillow and collapsed into sleep.