Some links to products and partners on this website will earn an affiliate commission.

You may loathe me for even saying this, but Ryanair are definitely getting better. Indeed as part of their campaign to (in Michael O’Leary’s own words) “stop p*ssing people off”, they have introduced a number of innovations that have made the flying experience with them a lot better, including reduced Ryanair baggage fees.

One element of this is a cheaper experience for families, which includes a 50% discount on Ryanair baggage fees for kids (under 16s). That’s great, and to begin with it brought with it a truly excellent additional loophole for cheap baggage fees. You could simply book your baggage in your child’s name, and it would all be half price. Yep, for every under 16 on your flight, you could add up to three checked-in bags, at half price. You did not need to buy any full-priced adult bags.

Sadly, Ryanair closed this loophole earlier this year, and instead required you to book an adult bag before you could book an equivalent number of child bags. However, a “lesser loophole” still remained here: you simply booked a 15kg adult bag at full price, and then booked a (more expensive, obviously) 20kg bag at half price in the child’s name. Obviously this wasn’t as much of a saving as the genuinely half price baggage loophole, but it did give you substantially cheaper Ryanair baggage fees overall.

How did that work in practice?

As an example, a 20kg bag on a +3 hour flight for an adult would cost £64 return (and 20kg + 15 kg (£44 return) for two adults would cost £108), while if you used the above loophole you would pay a substantially reduced £76 return for 35 kg (15kg at full price, plus 20kg at half price).

Sadly, however, even this fall-back loophole has now closed. Children now only get a discount on 15kg bags. As such, even if you buy a 20kg for an adult, the best half price offer you will get is on a 15kg bag.

This is a real shame, and well and truly ends any loophole element to the 50% discount offer for child baggage.

Any good news? Any further plans to reduce Ryanair baggage fees?

The small silver lining is the 50% discount on Ryanair baggage fees for kids with 15kg is still a reasonable offer in itself. However, it’s slightly disappointing that Ryanair did not at least maintain the 50% discount on 20kg bags for kids where the adult has paid for a 20kg bag.

Unsurprisingly, Ryanair have not made much of a fanfare when it comes to this news. However, there was better news earlier this year when Ryanair announced that baggage fees for 92% of passengers were to be reduced. With that in mind, I think you are unlikely to see any substantial positive changes to Ryanair baggage fees for some time yet.