Ryanair different flight price per country

One of AirHint visitors recently noticed that the prices for the same flight are slightly different in Irish vs. Italian versions of Ryanair official website. He asked us to research and demystify this issue.

Is it really cheaper to buy tickets in Ireland vs. Italy?

So we ran several experiments to see if it really makes a difference. We chose London Stansted (STN) to Barcelona (BCN) one-way flight departing on July 14, 2017.

Irish site

Italian site

Indeed we confirmed there is a difference in the initial prices shown after the flight search on the official Ryanair website for different countries. That confirmed the earlier observation of our customers. In fact it applied not only to Italian site, we found that

2% is added to the base price for the site in Austrian, French, Greek and Italian

We researched it further by following the booking process until the last step for both websites. It turned out that for Irish version at the very last step “payment fee” of the same 2%. This credit car fee of 2% is defined in Ryanair official table of fees.

It doesn’t happen in Italian version where the price stays the same from the first to the last flight booking step. With that payment fee applied at the end

the total price is the same for all countries.

Thus there is no difference in the final price when booking a Ryanair flight on different localized websites. There is only a difference only in the way when payment fee is added to the final price. We believe there are some local regulations that require to display the total price immediately after the initial flight options is displayed. However in Ryanair official sources we we could not find why this flow is only applicable to some countries.