Booking Ryanair: Cheap, but Sneaky

I just booked my first flight with Ryanair. In January, I'll be going to London for a day, so I was looking for an inexpensive trip there and back, preferably from Hamburg. Easyjet doesn't fly from here to London, DBA and HLX both depart from here but don't go to London, so I ended up with Ryanair. They claim to fly from Hamburg, but it's really Lübeck, an hour away. They must have missed that geography lesson.

So there I am, selecting days, flights, and I keep wondering about those ticket prices. The outbound flight costs 4,99€, the return is even less: 1 cent! Of course, I'm aware of the taxes, which brings the return flight to 50€, still only about 10% of a similar Lufthansa or BA flight. During the booking, however, I get increasingly mad about all those hidden fees or attempts to extract more money on top of the ticket.

First the system asks how many bags I'm planning to check. Checking between 1 and 5 bags costs an additional 9€ per flight. Ouch! However, I answer (truthfully): zero bags. Still I'm supposed to pay 6€ per flight. What the §&"#%@%!?? The zero option says something about Online checkin/priority boarding. First I thought: That makes sense: no bags, priority boarding. Wrong! I have to read a whole paragraph that explains how to opt out of this thing and simply travel with no bags. Another click per flight, and the additional fee is gone. Sneaky bastards.

Next stop: Travel insurance. They want me to pay 10,50€ per flight for insurance, and a number of pop-ups warn me that the airline recommends taking it. Again, I have to unselect the insurance option, otherwise I'll pay for an insurance that I have anyway through paying with the credit card. Which brings us to the last fee trap.

As this is an online booking service, paying by credit card is the most common option. Ryanair offers payment by Visa, MasterCard, AirPlus, and some stuff like Delta, ELV, Connect, Electron, whatever that is. Turns out, using my Visa card costs me another 10€, just to pay the bill. So that's how Ryanair makes its money: it's actually not an airline, but an Irish fee machine. Amazing business model, but it seems to work for O'Leary.

Holiday season in Athens

You got tagged!

I was just invited to join a Virtual Cocktail Party, as Jeff Pulver puts it. Through a number of referrals, I eventually got my invitation from my former META Group colleague Dave Yockelson. (Thanks, Dave, glad to have you back in the analyst rounds.) The idea of blog-tagging is, to ask 5 bloggers to tell 5 things that most people wouldn't know. Kinda like the (sometimes rather embarrassing) opening line at this cocktail party where everybody stands around with a Martini and nobody knows each other.

So here are some not so well known facts about me:

1. I can probably be considered Germany's first hacker when I broke the IBM 5100 security (1978).
   
2. Playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, KV 488, marks the height of my piano career.
3. On an American Airlines flight to Chicago, I once sat next to Dustin Hoffman (in coach).
   
4. I turned down a job at Netscape, because I thought browsers were silly stuff.
   
5. On average, I fly more miles in a week than I drive my car in a year.
   

So there you go. I'm sure those facts will eventually be used against me. And now for the tagging of others... TAG! You're it now...

• Frank Buytendijk
  
• Andy Hayler
  
• Michael Arrington
  
• Thomas Hawk
  
• Scott Adams
  

Two Dot Oh No!

What's with all the 2.0-ishness that everybody jumps on as if their life depends on it? Maybe it's all Tim O'Reilly's fault, since he created this Web 2.0 buzz, although a 2.0 moniker has been around for years, such as in Business 2.0. More recently, companies on my radar also start to use the term and position themselves in the Business Intelligence 2.0 space. Oh, please.

I had to find out what the hype is all about.

According to DMReview,

...business intelligence (BI) today has not changed in concept since the invention of the relational database and the SQL query - until the advent of BI 2.0.

What? Under which rock have they been hiding? First of all, BI wasn't there yet when RDBMS and SQL were invented, and I know that because I participated in projects around System R in the early 80s. And if I think about BI's evolution with reporting, OLAP, data mining, dashboards, scorecards, predictive models, etc.... this DMReview quote is pure nonsense. If anything, we should be talking about at least BI 8.0, considering the conceptual changes in the world of BI since we began. The article continues

If the goal of BI 2.0 is to reduce latency - to cut the time between when an event occurs and when an action is taken - in order to improve business performance, existing BI architectures will struggle.

With BI 2.0, data isn't stored in a database or extracted for analysis; BI 2.0 uses event-stream processing. As the name implies, this approach processes streams of events in memory, either in parallel with actual business processes or as a process step itself.

While I agree that there is an ongoing trend to reduce latency, this is nothing new. Changed Data Capture (CDC) mechanisms have been picking up events and transactions in near-realtime for years. So the "realtime"-aspect does not describe a completely new paradigm. And what's this thing about data not being stored or extracted? OK, an event does not need to be stored first in a database or any other content store to be analyzed, but event data all by itself is rather useless. Only in combination with existing BI infrastructure such as a data warehouse, any analytical component (in a process stream or not) can generate insight.

For example, let's assume there is a fraudulent event happening. Of course, nobody knows that fraud is about to be committed. The data associated with the event sits in this process stream and is not stored in a database (yet). So, everything is according to the definition above. Then what? How does that transaction event trigger any action elsewhere? How can any application or user figure out anything? Certainly not by simply looking at the transaction. The event data could be sent to some data mining model that generates a fraud score and then it triggers an alert. Is that what is meant by "event stream processing"? If so, we've been seeing this kinda thing for years. In fact, the whole discussion about analytical applications describes the same scenario: Operational applications (executed in "real-time") call analytical components that figure out something, send an alert, call another program or otherwise influence what is happening next. Sounds the same as BI 2.0 to me. Yawn.

Microsoft's new venture: Rugged Clothing

I'm in Athens today to deliver presentations at our BI event, but I'm curious about this other meeting that runs in another room here at the Ledra. Is Microsoft going into the clothing business?

While we're at it... I wonder how people book rooms using the URL on the shuttle bus. Unless I completely misunderstand top-level domains, or the Greeks are already using Web 3.0, with new naming conventions and all.