The dire state of the Ryanair menu and the horrendous prices associated with the food and drink on offer is hardly news. I do, though, feel it is worth highlighting just how bad things are. 'Value for money' is an alien concept for Ryanair; in fact, as well as VFM being missing completely, the quality of the food is non-existent as well.
It is sadly the case that the liquids are sold at outrageous prices. I have transposed the information from the Ryanair menu and the table below gives the true cost per litre of the drinks available on board. There's no mistaking the scale of the rip-off. For bench marking, I've included details on the prices available at Asda for the same products. Okay, the small quantities per serving on the plane mean higher pro-rata prices, but nevertheless, the picture is dismal. A litre of vodka works out at 110 Euros. What's even more alarming is that the exchange rate means that's £110 because in the world of Ryanair, nothing's fair. Ha! I like that and so have just renamed this post to mirror this sentiment.
On my last flight, I wanted some food and there were some offers that meant food at 3 Euros instead of 5 Euros. Needless to say that when the chap came down the aisle with pen and paper to take orders for hot food, there was so little in stock that none of the items on offer was available, and the choice was limited to nuggets, chips or a hot dog. I bought some chips and it is for this reason that the eagle-eyed among you will notice chips listed in the table. Of course they are not a liquid, but there's every reason to highlight the excessive charges that applied to what turned out to be the most meager portion of vile tasting microwave chips that I've ever encountered. So, where I thought water at more than four times the price of petrol would prove to be the worst buy, it turned out to be the chips that were the villains of the skies - behind Ryanair itself, of course.
Chips as 10.31 Euros is hardly a bargain. I calculated this through assessing the volume of chip served within the box. There were, for my 3.50 Euros, 26 chips, each with a cross section at approximately 1cm x 1cm. The typical length of these limp pieces of potato was in the region of 33mm. Now, there were a few smaller ones that would have struggled to be called chips in an identity parade, and perhaps six or so that could claim to be about an inch/25mm longer. That means, based on a litre being 1000 cubic centimetres, that 3x10x10 chips could be contained in one litre. Put another way, that's 101.82 metres of chip. This produces a litre price of 10.31 Euros. In reality, the content of the order was probably less, as the chips were not so much truncated to maximise girth for their full length, as prone to taper, which would of course reduce the chip volume. It is safe to say that the maximum theoretical chip volume was a third of a litre at best. I suspect the true volume was actually more likely to have been as little as a quarter of a litre, pushing the price per litre to 14 Euros.
Anyway, I would urge all travellers firstly to avoid Ryanair, and secondly (assuming failure on the first suggestion) to avoid buying the chips.
NB: The claimed portion size by weight is 100g. Assuming the volume of the chips is at 0.25 litres rather than my over-generous 0.33 litres, then that would give us the means to log the density - 0.4g per cubic centimetre of chip. I will need to make further enquiries to see just how this compares with McCain's version.
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