My tweet of the week arrived courtesy of literary agent Jonny Geller. “Ryanair surely wins the prize for greenest airline,” he posted the night before last. “You will never want to fly again.”

His message alighted on the screen of my iPad at the precise nadir of my own Ryanair hell, puncturing the misery momentarily. I was attempting to re-book flights to Italy for maybe the tenth time in under a week — flights that were due to take off less than 36 hours later and which only that day I’d discovered had ceased to exist in Ryanair’s nightmarishly opaque system, despite a confirmation email and reference number.

Given how many times the Irish airline’s website crashed, froze and failed to complete the payment process during the first 48 hours of my gruelling booking marathon, I can only assume half of London is similarly seething with impotent rage.

Geller may have been tweeting in the aftermath of an actual flight but his sentiment is still spot on if you can’t get off the ground. Were someone to invent a device with the precise aim of tormenting busy individuals to within a whisker of their sanity, it would be the Ryanair flight booking system. Nothing about it is simple, quick or even cheap.

It takes around half an hour to wend your way through the labyrinthine booking process — much longer than most other airlines — which I repeated five fruitless times in a day. You must stay alert or find yourself shockingly out of pocket as the total ratchets rapidly up on the side of your screen: what began for me as an £18.99 single ended up as a £545 family-budget buster.

There are tripwires aplenty: be careful to opt out of priority boarding (£10), receiving a text update (£1.50) and buying a suitcase of a size that won’t get you fined or turned away at the airport (from £52). To avoid adding travel insurance (from £9.66), you need to first find a button deliberately hidden in the middle of a drop down menu. And if you want to check in a modest bag of just 20kg it’ll cost you a whopping £70. So much for those 1p flights.

It’s hardly news that the lure of cheap flights is little more than a marketing ruse. How else would Michael O’Leary be able to boast of his record €503 million (£406 million) profits — an increase of 25 per cent year-on-year — despite steep rises in the cost of fuel and aviation tax?

What’s surprising is that the ruse still works. Despite the airline achieving a negative rating in a recent “reputation and recommendability” survey, passenger numbers are going up — 5 per cent higher in May than last year.

Yesterday I was amused to receive a message from Ryanair. More than a day after I’d discovered their mess-up myself and re-booked with easyJet (£200 cheaper) there came an emailed apology, alerting me to the fact that my flights were missing — but no mention of compensation.

By this time the price for one leg of my journey had risen as high as a BA business class flight to Pisa. Talking up his balance sheet the other week, O’Leary said: “The demand for low fares is extraordinary.” Austerity may be biting but there is such a thing as false economy.