Avoiding administrative fees on Ryanair

Anyone contemplating flying with Ryanair should go to the website and click on "fees". The list is overwhelming: In addition to a plethora of checked baggage fees (which everyone has today, but you should understand before believing that they have low fares), a $10 fee for using anything other than a Prepaid MasterCard, and a $30 fee for booking by phone at the call center. One should also check the tab for "Route maps" where Ryan obscurely admits that a lot of their airports are not where they imply they are. For instance, Frankfurt-Hahn, "Ryanair's low cost flights to Frankfurt-Hahn Airport land 124km from central Frankfurt" or Duesseldorf, "Ryanair's low cost flights to Düsseldorf's Airport Weeze land 70km from central Düsseldorf".

Is the prepaid card in US $ or Euro? Not sure what you are trying to avoid.

Card is in dollars, but I've never had a problem with a credit card converting to a foreign currency. Also, you have the option on Ryanair's website to pay in dollars (at an inflated exchange rate). This also did not work. Ryanair charges sizeable administrative fees to all payment methods other than prepaid mastercard.

Call your card issuer and tell them you're going to do a foreign transaction. It may be your card issuer's security system that's blocking the transaction.

Tried this. The card company says that Ryanair hasn't even run the card, implying that something in Ryanair's system is not recognizing it as a valid prepaid mastercard number. Since Ryanair wasn't even trying to process the transaction, the card company said it was out of their hands.

Lee has a good point. Besides factoring all of the fees ,you have to also add the transportation cost from- and -to the obscure airports. And their baggage restrictions are much tighter than anyone else. But...if you do your homework, and add up all the fees, and transportsion costs, sometimes you can save quite a few dollars. Last year our TOTAL costs fro a our flight from Sardinia to Rome were less than $100 US each. (including Limo transportion!) One year we flew from Frankfurt Hahn (try fiding that in the middle of the night!) to Faro, Portugal for less than a total of $50 each.

I think that your issue is a definition of the type of card. Ryanair waives the fee for the use of a Mastercard prepaid DEBIT card, where your transaction is being handled as a credit card transaction. If they process it as debit, they incur no fees, if they do credit, the CC Company charges them a fee or percentage. You probably get the same story from merchants here in the US. I do not believe they are able to process as a debit transaction, usually these are the Chip and Pin type cards that you load with currency. The fact that you are doing it in Dollars is an issue as well most likely.

Sorry I didn't specify, but my card is a prepaid debit mastercard, and I'm asking them to process it that way. I definitely don't think the card being in dollars is the problem, since Ryanair recognizes that the card is American and tries to charge in dollars (at an inflated exchange rate). My guess is that they don't recognize the BIN as a prepaid mastercard, and I'm wondering if their system simply doesn't handle US issued prepaid debit mastercards. Has anyone had success with this? If so, what bank issued the card?

The last time I booked with Ryanair, they didn't have that charge yet. But if the charge for paying with something other than a prepaid Mastercard debit is only $10, haven't you spent more than that already in time and energy trying to resolve your problem? I'd just pay by another method and forget about it.