If you book a flight on Ryanair from the UK to a eurozone country, you can save a lot of money by booking two single flights instead of a straightforward return. The difference is mainly down to the exchange rates applied by Ryanair on flights and the different add-ons they sell. By booking a return, you’re essentially allowing them to apply their own exchange rate to every item on the return leg – as a general rule, allowing anybody to apply their own exchange rate results in only one winner (hint: it isn’t you).
Having recently flown to Gran Canaria with Ryanair I was surprised by how easily I managed to save enough to cover a couple of decent meals. Here’s an example to illustrate this: it’s based on a family of four (two adults, two kids) flying over the February half-term holidays from Stansted to Las Palmas, and in this example the family saves over £80.
In scenario 1, the family makes a return booking.
The return flight is £140.99 per person (total £563.96).
Let’s say they pay for 4 check-in bags of 15kg each; that’s £20 each for adults and £10 each for the kids, which adds £60 to the total.
On top of that, presumably they’ll want to make sure they’re sitting together, so for four allocated seats we need to add £32.96 (£10.99 for adults and £5.49 for the kids)
The total cost for the return flight is £656.92.
Now here is exactly the same flight, with the same passenger details, but booked as a one-way fare – Ryanair will always use the currency of the point of departure, which in this case is the euro.
The fares for the flights are €174.99 each – which at today’s exchange rate of 1.375 is £127.26; we’re already saving money.
Then the biggest difference: for the luggage and allocated seats, Ryanair charge the same amount in euros as they do in pounds. So where bags are £20, they are also €20; where seats are £10.99, they’re also €10.99. So the add-ons which cost £92.96 on the return flight, come to €92.96 on a one-way ticket – a saving of around £25 for the family of four.
So how do the totals compare?
The one-way flight comes to €792.92. Even by Ryanair’s own calculation (below) the family will have saved £42.55, just by booking two one-way flights instead of a return.
But that’s only part of the savings. Ryanair’s figures rely on them applying their own exchange rate, which in this case is £1 = €1.29. On the payment screen they will prompt you to pay in pounds, and a warning box will advise you of the risks of not accepting their exchange rate. Ignore these warnings and choose to pay in euros – you then will pay an amount which depends on your bank’s charging policy, and even the stingiest banks are likely to offer a better rate than this.
I use a Metro Bank debit card, which applies the mid-market bank rate (today that’s £1 = €1,375) and doesn’t charge any transaction fees. So in this case, a currency site such as XE.com provides a fairly accurate measure of what I’d be paying with my debit card – as you can see, it represents a further saving of £37.76 over the Ryanair exchange rate.
That’s £576.61, as opposed to £656.92 – a total saving of £80.31.
So next time you book a flight with Ryanair, spend a few minutes checking the difference between booking return fares and two one-way fares; it might cover a slap-up dinner with enough left over for a few jugs of sangria.
