Should I buy my brother a Ryanair Christmas voucher?

Simon Calder on festive gift cards, packing Christmas presents, and travelling to Colombia

The airline has a good range of flights to Pisa – but it doesn’t have a UK monopoly (Simon Calder)

Q I have just received an email headed: “Make your Christmas shopping stress-free.” I’m all in favour of that. The invitation is from Ryanair and urges me to “gift your loved ones a Ryanair gift card”. My brother has a house near Pisa in Italy and regularly flies there on Ryanair. Should I be tempted to send him £100 worth of flights?

Sarah A

A This is a question I tend to get each December, and my answer remains the same: no. I welcome the general trend towards giving experiences rather than goods. What better, you might wonder, than the gift of travel? But if you buy a gift card for a particular airline, you risk providing a distinctly inferior experience.