Ryanair's new 7-day check-in rules

A question about : Ryanair's new 7-day check-in rules

Is Ryanair forcing me into reserving and paying extra for our seats?

If I understand them correctly, under Ryanair's new rules, effective 8 April 2014, if you do not purchase a seat, and therefore have one allocated for you by Ryanair, you have to check in online and print your boarding passes from 7 days to 2 hours before the flight.

We want to book flights for a 2-week holiday, so for the return flight, how do we print the boarding passes during the second week from our foreign holiday destination? (We do not intend taking a printer on holiday!)

Are they making me pay for seats on the return flight so I can print the boarding passes before we go on holiday or am I missing something?

Any help would be appreciated!

Best answers:

• Internet caf!? Or ask the hotel is they have a printer available to you? Or if you don't want to print them out there, pay for the seats or pay for boarding cards at the airport (more expensive).
• I can't remember the last airport I used that didn't have an Internet cafe where you can print off boarding passes.
• I don't think the 7 day limit for non-reserved seats is unreasonable. If you're paying to reserve a seat you will probably do so in advance of the trip, and you would expect to have the full choice of seats available to you. If they allow people who are not reserving a seat to check in earlier, the computer will have to allocate seats to them which will then reduce the choice available to those paying for reserved seats.
  They could give everyone a reserved seat, but then they'd just increase the cost of all the flights by Ј5/Ј10.
  I agree that mobile boarding passes are the best solution. I don't know if there are any technical issues with rolling this out to all the tiny airports that basically only exist to serve Ryanair - although I'm sure they could roll it out to most destinations without any problems. Of course, it'll probably just result in people who don't have smartphones moaning about being treated unfairly.
• I flew with Ryan Air back in December when we went to Cyprus for a holiday. We aslo had to allocate our own seats but I just bypassed that option and if you do that they allocate a seat for you and any other passengers with you. Why pay for it when you have paid for the actual flight to start with. Their planes are terribly uncomfortable anyway but does the job.
  With regards to printing your boarding passes, when you log on to your booking you should have an option to print all journeys so you can print your boarding passes for outbound and inbound journeys. That's what I did and it worked ok. Ryan Air are a low fair airline and its just another way to make money from the customer. Just bypass allocating a seat. They have to give you a seat as you have paid for the flight!
  Hope that helps and enjoy your holiday!
• Ryanair recently cancelled my flight 4 hours before it was due to leave by email only. Luckily, I had checked my computer before setting off for a 4 hour round trip to the airport.
  I'll never fly with them again