I am a train fan, don’t get me wrong. Save the planet, interesting cabin-mates, watch the countryside roll by, leave from the centre of the city, I know all that.

And who wouldn’t want to have a full day in Barcelona, treat ourselves in the restaurant on wheels and then wake up in Paris?

Except the cabin was so small we had to drape our legs over our scant belongings, first class passengers got priority in the buffet car, and they weren’t moving. We ended up fossicking a few biscuits out of the bottom of our bags for dinner.

This time, we had an inflatable kayak and were meeting in Frankfurt in Germany to go paddling in Puglia in southern Italy. I carefully worked out an itinerary that involved three days of trains and two overnight stops before my friend sounded the death-knell:

“With an extra 25 kilograms of kayak and four disassembled paddles on my back? No.”

It was time to invoke the 10-Hour Rule. If a train trip will take more than 10 hours, I allow myself to fly.

Ryanair gets only bad publicity and I am sure it invents things just to get free mentions in the media. £1 to use the toilet? Standing room tickets? It’s just a clever PR strategy.

I have been based in Europe for the past 10 years and had avoided Ryanair although I happily took its clones, EasyJet and Wizz, which specialises in Eastern Europe. OK, Ryanair did have a life-threatening situation with a broken window in July but as it pointed out, it has up to 4000 flights a day and it was nothing particular to its aircraft or operation.

On the day we flew with Ryanair to Italy, our plane was new and clean with a bright yellow and blue livery; the staff were cheerful. The check-in – even with the 25 kilograms and paddles wrapped in emergency tape – was textbook and about $100 for each of us, including 20 kilograms of luggage and slightly more for the kayak. We were in Bari well before Aperol Spritz-hour.

However, as innumerable television programs have shown, there are rookie errors. All three airlines operate on the same principles, only their colours are different. And to keep costs down, they do it with ruthless efficiency.

Seven things you must know before you go:

1. Luggage

It’s all automated and if you’ve booked 10 kilograms of luggage and are even a kilogram over, you will be in a world of pain. There are scant staff to assist and you will have to pay a big surcharge.

I found it better to have a full-size lightweight suitcase and pay the small increment to get 20 kilograms of luggage, to save the stress of that “will it or won’t it?” last-minute weigh-in.

For about $120, Ryanair let us take the kayak with us. Photo: Deirdre Smith

2. Hand luggage

Cabin luggage also attracts a fee and it is more expensive than checked luggage because of the grab-and-go convenience. However, European regulations allow a free under-seat bag of 40x30x15 centimetres, the size of a small overnight bag.

This is consistent across all airlines, to end previous practices of a variety of allowances that helped them to score that last-minute gotcha excess-luggage charge. Pack your electronica and books in the under-seat bag, as it can be any weight you like. Trying to carry it and look carefree is another matter entirely.

In Australia, Jetstar has just announced a similar policy, to predictable hails of outrage, but it works, kids, it works. Boarding is smooth, with minimal stress, as few people opt for the overhead option and so there is nobody trying to stuff a bag half the size of a refrigerator into the locker above your seat.

3. Online check-in

There was the predictable hands-to-the-heaven outrage when Ryanair announced it would soon dispense with printed-out tickets. Paper tickets don’t cost it anything, as you do it yourself at home, but it does slow the system.

Check-in will soon be online only. You will receive a push notification to check in three days before but that is only to tempt you to pay for a selected seat. You must wait until 24 hours prior to the flight to check in with free seat allocation.

Online check-in closes two hours before the flight. Do it the night before, just to make sure you don’t forget.

You’re allowed a standard bag under your seat, but the rules are tough for other luggage.

4. Airport location

And you thought Tullamarine was a long way out? Our Ryanair airport, Frankfurt Hahn, should more correctly be called Frankfurt Luxembourg, as it is 120 kilometres from the real Frankfurt. In some smaller capital cities such as Warsaw, the cheap airlines use the main airport but mostly you’re in the boonies.

Don’t fear – but you do need to plan. A bus left the central Frankfurt bus station at 9.50am, in plenty of time for our 1.20pm flight. It cost €23 ($A38) and we had to book it. There is no turning up to the bus station and waiting for the next one, as buses are timed to the flights. Within 20 minutes of getting off the bus, we had checked the luggage, kayak and all, and were through security and waiting for the plane.

5. Plane-train combos

The use of outlying airports means you may not necessarily get to where you want to go.

A friend in Germany lives an hour from Dortmund. As a train trip from Warsaw would have exceeded the 10-Hour Rule, all I needed was a short flight to that small and insignificant airport, and an easy train trip to reach him.

6. Why-not destinations

I have had €10 fares ($A17) to Debrecen, the second-largest city in Hungary, a shabby Habsburg jewel, and Ohrid in Macedonia, a lakeside resort with Ottoman-era architecture and Eastern European glamazons whose bikinis were as brief as their legs were long.

For not much more, Tuzla in Bosnia-Herzegovina offered a Soviet-era military airport and a mountain town where minarets rather than church steeples peeked up through the mists.

Dubrovnik airport is tiny but the crowds in that city are huge. At Zadar, 330 kilometres further up the Croatian coast, the only other tourists were Germans who had driven a very long way. And Zadar offered me a €14.99 ($25) flight to Vienna, as long as I was prepared to get up 4am. Of course I was.

Mixing it with glamazons in Ohrid – for a bargain fare. Photo: Deirdre Smith

7. But don’t

Food and beverage service on Ryanair is available only via the app. Prices are similar to Australia, around $6 for a coffee and $12 for a sandwich.

Our flight from Bari in Italy across the Adriatic Sea to Dubrovnik was so short that the flight attendant stood and waited after she delivered my friend’s $12 whisky. “I have to collect it 10 minutes before landing,” she apologised.

But being the only flight arriving, 20 minutes after landing and united with our kayak, we were heading for the door for an Uber that cost more than our flight.