Why do luxury hotels behave like Ryanair?

We're just back from a great holiday in Italy, taking in the opera in Milan and Verona, great historic sights in both cities, the beautiful peace and quiet of Sant' Angelo on Ischia, and the chaotic energy of Naples. We had great food and wine, and are well refreshed. But as we stayed in five different hotels across Italy, a curious point struck me about the different attitude of different hotels: the posher hotels act most like Ryanair in their treatment of their guests.

To illustrate, we stayed in hotels in Milan and Verona, both attractive small-ish hotels where there was inclusive breakfast, free wifi and free soft drinks from the mini-bar. Or, rather, we were assumed to have paid for all these in our room tariff in the same way that British Airways didn't charge extra for our luggage and a sandwich when we returned from Naples yesterday. But when we stayed the last couple of nights at a more upmarket Naples hotel - which was very nice - the charges came thick and fast. Three Euros for thirty minutes using your own computer to access the Internet. Six Euros for a small bottle of coke or four for a small mineral water from the minibar. Thirty Euros each for breakfast if we wanted it. I know from experience that this is the norm: 3* and some 4* hotels are far more likely than 5* hotels to provide wifi and mineral water as standard.

At the very least, wifi should be free in any room and not treated as a cash cow. And mineral water should be offered where the tap water is undrinkable. After all, hotels don't charge people extra for the toiletries or TV which are included in a room price. And hotels that charge for wifi should be required explicitly to publish their charges in the same way that Ryanair (however reluctantly) has to publish its ludicrous baggage charges. There are an increasing number of great hotels that offer free wifi, while others can charge as much as £20 a day. It is time that hotels were required to spell out their extras as explicitly as any budget airline: the irony is that it is the most upmarket ones that will complain loudest when they are.

Ryanair's grim future in Marseille

We've just returned from a good holiday in the South of France, which finished with three days in the buzzy environs of the Vieux Port in Marseille. But our departure from Marseille Airport presented a less happy spectacle. We were flying EasyJet back to Bristol, and were forced to depart from a ghastly shed designed to house budget airlines - mainly Ryanair - known as MP2. The taxi dropped us at the main terminal and trolleys are blocked from MP2. MP2 doesn't take your bags at check-in; instead you must carry them past another checkpoint and load them on a baggage rail later. You then face long surly queues for security, followed by a passport queue. Although there are a few shops in the terminal, the departure gates area is seatless, and you must stand for ages waiting for the flight to land. This is the future that Michael O'Leary wants for all fliers. And it is not a pleasant one.

Ryanair's boss has a lavatorial sense of humour

Having this week booked a couple of 'free flights' to Dublin from Ryanair that cost in excess of £100 each, including the luxury of checking in one suitcase each and using a credit card to pay, nothing surprises me about Michael O'Leary. So news that he wants to charge people for using the on-board lavatories is no great surprise.

Passengers who want to escape the inane chatter from the combination of on-board mobile phones and incessant scratchcard selling would surely be prepared to pay - so long as there was some soundproofing involved.

Ryanair's own taxes

I know that Ryanair did a lot to bring airline prices down, but they can hardly claim to be such a cheap option today. It is a salutary experience booking with Ryanair these days, watching their increasingly silly charges mount up.

It is true, as Michael O'Leary regularly moans, that the UK Treasury takes perhaps £20 more a flight than, for example, the Irish government. But that ignores Ryanair's own taxes. They now charge an extra £16 per passenger each way in taxes of their own: £8 a bag, £4 to check in (and they don't let you check suitcases in on a computer without a charge) and £4 for the privilege of paying for it all, per passenger on each leg of the journey. If you're not careful they will also sign you up for early boarding and overpriced insurance on a website that keeps trying to add these things back.

And if you book to return from a different European airport than the one you travel into, you pay a currency surcharge which adds another £4 to the cost. Add to that the incessant blather on the flight as they try to sell you scratch and phone cards. You pay a lot for your 'no frills' experience. But Michael O'Leary has surely missed a few tricks. After all, we don't yet have the £5 charge for a seat - we could sit on the floor if they ripped them out. And what about a tenner to use the airport steps - after all, we could just jump off the aircraft? Or a fiver for peace and quiet on the plane? No wonder he looks so confident about surviving the credit crunch.

Ryanair money generation

To Dublin for a pre-Christmas weekend to see family and friends. Taking the Ryanair flight from Bristol is the only way to get there now that Aer Lingus has stopped doing the route. The service is ahead of time and very efficient, as well as reasonably good value despite the 'extras' like check-in luggage. But what is intensely irritating is having to listen to 50 minutes of inane chatter fumbled through by a crew that seems unfamiliar with reading English (or perhaps they just have better taste than to familiarise themselves with the gibberish given to them by Michael O'Leary) as we are sold newspapers, coffee and tea, lottery tickets, gift vouchers and other dubious offers. The 'raffle' had to be drawn four times before anyone on the half-full plane claimed their prize of an immensely complex Ryanair voucher. Is it possible to pay an extra fiver a head just for a bit of peace and quiet?