I just spot checked and you can even find round trip for about that cross country. There was even some delta flights showing up really cheap.

Too bad they’re never cheap when I need to travel…

To be fair, those are on Frontier, so it's roughly equivalent to Ryanair.

Aer Lingus is a slightly weird case; they have essentially become a budget airline (at least for their European business) to compete with Ryanair, but they haven't yet gotten around to adopting most of the dark patterns.

As a bit of a bonus for the latter airline, you are permitted to yell "Forth Aer Lingus!" as you charge headlong towards your seat.

RyanAir is ultra-budget. You need to be ready for the whole thing, but often you can get something much cheaper. As an example, looking for London to Belfast next month, RyanAir is a fifth the price.

>Those incidentals would not increase your fare 5-8 times Oh I see what you're saying. What I'm saying is, what's the alternative? Another more expensive airline whose online check-in takes 5min instead of 10min? I'm contending that even with the dark patterns, my downside is only 1.5x cost, which is still far, far below a non-budget airline.

>nor can the price difference to US be the base for your cost savings Yeah I agree it's not perfect — but as someone who used to live in the US it's a base for me

Well, I suppose the argument is that Ryanair et al fundamentally changed the European market, and without them the European market would be like the US market, and way more expensive. Which is definitely _plausible_, but kinda counterfactual.

Whenever I have to book Ryanair, there's a lot of clicking back and forth between screens to confirm I've made the right choices.

Ten minutes is a long time. That's the purpose of dark patterns.

> Now quit bachelor partying in Spain before they throw objects at you.

While a fair number of us do a lot to earn our collective reputation, some of us nip to Spain for other reasons and carry ourselves with a bit of care and comportment so your assumption there might be a bit too knee-jerk.

Anecdata: I spent a week in a small seaside town in Costa Brava in mid May. Took part in their local annual running festival, explored the countryside, did some more obvious touristy bits around there and in Barcelona. I'm trying to learn the language¹, and managed to use some of it without people spotting my lack of ability and instantly switching to English².

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[1] as I might like to live over there in later life and refuse to be the sort of git who arrives and expects everyone to speak English.

[2] in fact a couple of people I encountered, a taxi driver and a lovely woman running a small family run bookshop³, didn't speak a word - and through their patience and my pidgin Castilian we managed to successfully interact.

[2] a rare to find these days, especially in a bit city, I hope the place does the roaring trade it deserves as I hope it'll still be there so I can drop back to get more practice reading material next time I'm nearby.

And the prize for the most HN comment goes to...