Ryanair

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Ryanair

Basic information
Founded	1985
Legal Structure	Public
Industry	Aviation
Also known as
Official website	https://www.ryanair.com

Ryanair is an Irish ultra-low-cost airline operating in over 40 countries.

Consumer-impact summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

• User Freedom
• User Privacy
• Business Model
• Market Control

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Incidents

This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Ryanair category.

Forced App-Downloads (November 2025)

Starting November 12th, 2025, Ryanair requires passengers to install their app on their smart phones to use as a digital boarding pass.

Alternative, less invasive and more privacy friendly workflows, such as PDF files or the usual passes for Apple and Google Wallet as well as the countless compatible open-source alternatives from the F-Droid store are not supported.

Passengers have the option to manually request a currently free paper boarding pass at the airport after checking in online before. Simply printing their own or using a digital boarding pass without the Ryanair app is, however, not possible.

Having an app installed on users' phones gives the company free advertising every time they see the icon on their homescreen, allows it to harvest significantly more data and enables it to send users advertising in the form of notifications.

At the time of writing, the iOS version of the app has a size of about 304 MB and the Android version about TODO.

According to the Exodus privacy project, the Android version of the app sends data to the following 9 tracking and advertising services and also requests access to the advertising ID of the device:

• Adobe Experience Cloud
• Facebook Analytics
• Facebook Share
• Google CrashLytics
• Google Firebase Analytics
• Google Tag Manager
• Inmobi
• Swrve

Users who use the app have to use something like the F-Droid version of Tracker Control if they wish to prevent the app from contacting and sending personal data to these companies.

Greenwashing

The press release quotes the CEO that the measure would lead to "faster, smarter, and greener” travel. Saving resources in a mostly irrelevant area that barely contributes to the environmental impact is a common strategy used by companies with a high resource footprint (such as Apple moving to more environmentally friendly packaging while the main product is still a repair-unfriendly disposable electronic item made with rare earth minerals). The vast majority of the emissions of an airline are generated by fuel combustion and energy consumption by the airports.

Cheap prices with excessive surcharges

TODO – see Wikipedia section on surcharges

Misleading advertising regarding emissions

TODO – see this BBC article

Safety concerns due to insufficiently fuelling of aircrafts

TODO – find some good and reputable sources