On the 17th of December 2004 I took my first ever flight: Stansted to Sandefjord Torp, Ryanair’s approximation of a London to Oslo service. Today, 20 years and 226 take-offs later, I did it again.
That 2004 trip was the first of many I have since made to Norway, a country which has remained a favourite. When I realised earlier this year that Ryanair still operate to Torp – alongside the more sensibly located Oslo Gardermoen – my initial instinct was to recreate my original 5 day itinerary. But work schedules are less forgiving than student ones, and returning to the UK just before Christmas was impractical. Keen to mark the precise anniversary of the outbound flight, I would have to truncate my time on the ground.
But if I was altering when I flew back, why not adjust other aspects too? Thus I hit on the idea of a “how times have changed” comparison: recreating the no-frills Ryanair experience on the way out, but making use of my staff travel perks with BA for the return. By doing so, I hoped to gauge how flying has evolved for me, personally, over 20 years.
I won’t say much about my time in Oslo – staying just two nights, I borrowed heavily from previous, similarly short visits.
Booking
Searching 3 months in advance, the Ryanair website offered me a ticket on my desired departure date for just under £50. This was their ‘basic’ fare, which offers almost nothing more than the right to fly. I had decided to go all-in on minimalism – or perhaps masochism – so then ran a gauntlet of warnings and upsell-attempts, declining them all in search of the payment screen:
- A pop-up immediately cautioned that I wouldn’t be able to check-in until 24 hours before the flight, and could end up allocated a seat anywhere on the aircraft, including the middle of a row.
- I was permitted a single under-seat bag, not to exceed 40×20×25cm: turn up with anything larger or a second item, and I’d be on the hook for a €70 fee at the gate (but adding a cabin bag now would be just £17.50).
- Check in bags started at £14.40, but only for a 10kg rollaboard – for something resembling actual luggage, it was £31.49.
- Did I want to escape a crowd of people, and join the fast track line at Stansted? That would be £6.50.
- Travel Insurance came in 3 flavours: standard, plus, and annual.
- I could buy anything from £4.75 to £19 of inflight credit, and get 10% extra free – but there was no indication of what onboard items would cost.
- Car-hire was next, followed by parking at Stansted (more expensive than the flight).
- Bus and Train options could actually have been useful – except they weren’t available for Torp.
- I had to confirm my contact details, but then be careful to avoid signing up for marketing – or for my flight details to be sent via SMS, as that service is another £2.99.
- A second attempt at selling insurance was made, paired with an opportunity to compensate for my CO2 emissions (a mere £2.46).
Many clicks later, I finally emerged with a satisfyingly un-altered price breakdown, and checked out for a grand total of £49.06. Apparently this represents a saving of £1.93, but with no indication of why…
By contrast, arranging my BA flight took a matter of moments. Staff travel doesn’t use the normal shopping process: you can waitlist for a flight up to 12 weeks out, and don’t even have to pay at that stage. Fares aren’t revenue managed, but instead distance-based: for OSL-LHR, it would be a mere £27.60 in economy, for any flight date or time.
I paid an extra £30 for premium stand-by: this gives onload priority over staff who haven’t purchased it, and opens up seats in business class. You don’t get a refund of this fee if you end up in economy – or on a jump seat! – but it’s always worked out for me in the past. Whichever cabin I ended up in, I’d also get the full Club Europe luggage allowance – 2 cabin items, 2 checked bags – although I’d have to do a lot of shopping in Norway to use that given what I could bring on Ryanair!
On a December Thursday all flights looked quiet enough that I could expect a seat up front, so I picked the most attractive departure time. If I didn’t make it onto that, my booking would simply roll to the next one.
VERDICT An easy win for BA, even though booking doesn’t guarantee a seat on the plane… assuming the gamble pays off, I get a full-service experience for only a few pounds more than the most bare-bones low cost carrier ticket.
Check-in and pre-departure
Ryanair will charge you £55 to check-in at the airport, or £20 to re-issue a lost boarding pass. Unlike twenty years ago, both of these risks can be eliminated by using their app; but I still printed a paper copy just in case. A second salvo of all the ancillaries had the intended effect – there was only one aisle seat left in the back of plane, and I conceded it was worth the £8 asking price to avoid a middle.
Stansted airport is a lengthy journey from Devon, so I travelled the night before, stayed at the adjacent Radisson, and was able to walk into the terminal in a couple of minutes. A more meaningful metric would be the journey time from central London; 45 minutes by train from Liverpool Street Station.
There was barely a queue for security – fast track would definitely have been a waste – but the screening process itself took nearly a quarter of an hour. I triggered a false positive, and the seemingly inexperienced member of staff who did my pat-down didn’t know what to do when he couldn’t find anything, so just kept repeating steps. When I was finally reunited with my tray, I discovered the scanner had eaten my belt; no-one was in any rush to locate and return it…
The last time I passed through Stansted the lounge wasn’t accepting Priority Pass customers, so I didn’t feel bad that my membership has long since lapsed. Instead I made use of the main concourse for about an hour. This went well enough: there was a good range of options for lunch; I was able to refill my water bottle for free; and although crowded I did find a seat. On the downside: the bathrooms weren’t in great shape; the Ryanair app never declared boarding to have started; and it was quite a trek to the gate.
Once there, I was surprised by the complete lack of a queue – either priority boarding had already happened, or was being ignored. Nor was there any check of bag sizes, despite the dire warnings. After a short hold in a stairwell and a longer one on the tarmac, we were boarded via air stairs – I would estimate 20 minutes from gate to seat. To be honest, the whole process was very slick, and we pushed back exactly on schedule.
BA’s Oslo services operate from Gardermoen airport, just 23 minutes from the central station by regional trains (avoid the twice as expensive, yet only 4 minutes faster, Flytoget express). As I arrived at the terminal, I received a notification of a half hour delay to my flight, and discovered that the economy check-in queue was full to overflowing; a disadvantage of staff travel is that online check-in rarely works. I didn’t even have confirmation of which cabin I’d be in: gambling that my upgrade had come through, I joined the empty business class lane instead, and thankfully was issued a Club Europe boarding pass rather than being turned away.
That also entitled me to fast track security, skipping another lengthy line; in a reverse of my Stansted experience, it took ten minutes to reach the scanner, but then I breezed through with no additional checks.
Staff travel in premium cabins does not grant lounge access, so once again I had to make do with the main terminal. Fortunately OSL is a very pleasant airport – I found comfier seats and better tarmac views than are offered by lounges I’ve encountered elsewhere! It’s also a very quiet and peaceful environment.
I made a mistake in proceeding through border control to the F gates, where options for food were limited (and expensive); given the delay to the inbound aircraft, I should have had a meal in the main concourse. The gate was a bit of a scrum – although there was a separate queue and reserved seating area for club / status passengers, the group boarding system was not enforced.
We also needed a visit to the de-icing station before take off, so all told we departed Oslo about an hour late.
VERDICT Oslo Gardermoen is a far nicer airport than London Stansted, and better located. But considering the delays with BA, I have to give Ryanair the nod here for a smoother operation.
In flight
My Ryanair flight was on a 737-800, which in my recently-chosen 27D meant 29.5″ of seat pitch – a smidge more generous than you’d get down the back of a BA short haul plane these days. I was glad to have avoided a MAX aircraft – not out of safety concerns, but because Ryanair has configured them with just 28″ between rows. I’d also discovered that the ABC seats in rows 2-15 of the 737-8 are tighter: despite being priced higher!
The seat itself was comfortable enough, although there’s no recline, and with a full row, I was glad to be able to spill into the aisle. The overwhelming feel of the cabin is… cheap. Instead of using cards, safety instructions are stuck onto each garish yellow seatback; when the overhead bins were closed, they were plastered with advertising.
By comparison, seat 4A on a BA A320 was a bubble of calm: inoffensive colours, accentuated by mood-lighting. Whilst the days of 34″ seat pitch are long-gone, Club Europe does offer an extra inch over Euro Traveller. Adding to the sense of space are the blocked middle seats: in CE you’ll only ever get a window or aisle, with a table in-between. With just a handful of passengers in the cabin, this was less crucial: I had the whole row to myself!
The other benefit, of course, is a meal service. Exactly what you get varies with time of day and length of the flight, and on this occasion I got the afternoon tea:
Admittedly, Ryanair might have some more substantial hot options, but I find it hard to argue with free 
. Proper cutlery, crockery and glassware added to the upmarket feel, and although I don’t partake, alcoholic beverages are also included.
Both flights were smooth, apart from experiencing one of Ryanair’s famously firm landings: we reached Torp early, but I wouldn’t have minded a practice run! The BA arrival at Heathrow was late, but a good amount of the earlier delay had been recovered en route, touching down less than 15 minutes behind schedule.
VERDICT For a couple of hours, and provided you’ve managed expectations, Ryanair is fine. If it was the only way I could afford to travel, I’d put up with it. But gaining access to Club on BA – first through air miles, now as staff – turned flights from something to be endured, to something to be enjoyed.
Arrival and onward travel
One of the ways Ryanair keeps costs low is by flying to airports that may be a significant distance from the city they’re notionally serving. Torp is a good example, lying 75 miles south of Oslo. Back in 2004 I completed the trip by coach, the Torp Ekspressen. These are timed to suit incoming aircraft, but with generous padding, allowing at least 45 minutes for passengers to clear immigration and retrieve bags.
Since I’d made it from plane to bus stop in a mere 8 minutes, I was not inclined to hang around that long. Taking a shuttle bus to connect to an hourly train with the next departure due in 7 minutes seemed ambitious, but was fine: the drive took less than half that, and Torp station has a single platform, so I couldn’t get lost. A combined ticket purchased kerbside covered both bus and train for 379NOK (about £27). Booking in advance would have saved me £10, but cost me an hour – the service I travelled on would have been impossible were it not for the early arrival of the flight.
Even with that speed-up, it was only two hours after touching down in Torp that I reached Oslo’s central station. I spent longer on the train than the plane, and it added over 50% to the cost of the journey, too.
From wheels down at Heathrow Terminal 3 to being reunited with my girlfriend under the Paddington station Christmas tree took less than 40 minutes – probably a personal best, but I can reliably do this in under an hour. It helps that as BA staff I get 75% off the Heathrow Express – I would otherwise opt for the cheaper but slower Elizabeth Line, but for less than a fiver the HEX is the obvious choice. I had breezed through the border E-gates in literally a minute, and as I had no luggage to retrieve headed straight for the platforms where, as luck would have it, my arrival coincided with a train.
With 3 London hubs, BA is an easy win if you live in the capital, but for me to fly with them requires a 150 mile overland journey. So it’s not really fair of me to criticise LCCs for picking out-of-the-way airports when BA is hard to reach from the regions: Heathrow to Exeter is twice the time, distance and price of Torp to Oslo, and the train fare adds a hefty premium to my super-cheap tickets.
VERDICT I’d call this a tie… neither airline quite went where I wanted it to!
Final Thoughts
When I first took to the skies in 2004 I couldn’t imagine that aviation would become such an interest of mine, let alone my career. It took a couple of years to really get going, and initially I relied upon budget airlines like Ryanair, Easyjet and Norwegian, the destination being more important than the journey.
Fast-forward twenty years and I’ve racked up almost fifty flights in premium cabins, over half of which have been BA’s Club Europe. It’s become familiar, almost routine, to fly up front – so it’s been good to take stock of how things used to be.
I’ve no idea what travel will look like for me in 2044 – ideally by then I’m nearing retirement, which might be reflected in slower, overland adventures. But – assuming we’ve figured out an alternative to fossil fuels – I hope that I’m still flying then, ever adding to the airlines, aircraft and airports I’ve experienced.
