Spanish Business News

The budget airline is demanding that from January passengers who book flights with Electron cards also pay transaction fees.

Ryanair customers who have taken out Visa Electron cards to beat the airline's sky-high card charges will from next month face the same £5-a-leg fee as customers using conventional debit and credit cards.

From 1 January, the only way to buy a flight without incurring transaction fees will be through a MasterCard prepaid card. Electron users will face the same £5-per-passenger charge for each journey on all flights booked using conventional credit or debit cards, meaning two adults booking return flights face charges of £20 even if the flights are paid for on the same card during the same transaction.

Ryanair says the decision to introduce charges on Visa Electron is because it is being phased out in the UK. Last week Abbey confirmed it would not be issuing Electron cards to customers from 14 December.

The airline claims that the card charges when booking flights are not a revenue stream for the company but are spent on its website.

The problem for budget-conscious travellers is that there are currently no free-to-use prepay cards, so anyone buying a Ryanair flight in future is likely to have to make some sort of card payment.

Ryanair says 30% of its customers use Electron cards to buy seats, so there will be a scramble to find the lowest-cost prepaid card before 1 January.

Stephen McNamara, the airline's chief spokesman, described his customers as "cute hoors" (Irish slang for whore, more generally used to mean rogue or sneaky person), who will use the time between now and 1 January to line up the best prepaid deal.

MasterCard prepaid cards are available through some banks, as well as other financial organisations, such as Virgin. The cards are pre-loaded with cash, so people do not need to be credit-checked to get one, but they come with a range of charges, including a set-up fee, a monthly service charge, a loading fee and cash withdrawal or purchase fees.

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