Delayed... Ryanair puts off new bag fee

Move ‘a bid to restore credibility’ after flight fiasco

RYANAIR’S plans to make passengers pay for priority boarding if they want to hang onto their main cabin bag when they board have been postponed until January 15.

The scandal-hit airline was due to make passengers pay an extra €5 for priority boarding from November 1 if they wanted to avoid having to check in their bags at the departure gates.

The airline is also cutting the check-in bag charge from €35 to €25, and has raised the weight limit from 15kg to 20kg.

However, the budget-flyer has now postponed these new measures until mid-January, saying it wants to give customers more time to adjust to the policy change, particularly during the busy Christmas period.

But travel industry expert Eoghan Corry of travelextra.ie said: ‘I think they’ve had so much bad press [that] they didn’t want problems over bags so soon after the flight cancellations, so they’re going to be doing everything they can to recover their credibility.’

The move comes in the wake of the roster-bungling fiasco, which saw the airline slammed for cancelling more than 700,000 flight bookings and more than 20,000 flights over the winter.

The airline claimed that a change in annual leave rotas meant they had to squeeze its pilots’ leave into nine months rather than 12, leaving them with a pilot shortage, and forcing them to cancel hundreds of thousands of flights.

However, others have claimed the reason for the cancellation was a large number of pilots leaving due to dissatisfaction with the terms and conditions.

The airline said it was introducing the new bag policy as there was not enough room in overhead cabin bins for the large carry-on bags passengers were bringing on board.

So from January if a passenger brings two bags to the boarding gate, the airline says it will load the larger wheelie bag in the plane’s hold for free, while the passenger can carry on the smaller bag.

The airline says the delay in bringing in the new rules until January 15 is ‘to allow customers more time to adjust to the changes, particularly during the busy Christmas period’.

Ryanair says its new bags policy is to encourage more customers to check in bags.

Mr Corry said what the airline wanted in the cancelled flights fiasco was to be decisive, to cancel flights and get it over with. ‘But the real issue for them is to go for growth. They already have the people who go for price all the time – and need another market. They’ve been working very hard on it.

‘They realised what a lot of us have known for ages: [that] a customer who is won and lost again is much harder to win back. That’s the real problem for them so they’re afraid of losing any more.

‘These people have been telling us for 20 years the opinion of the public doesn’t count. So this is a very public admission that they do listen to their customers. When they get a bad press, they do listen.’

Meanwhile, Ryanair’s chief operations officer Michael Hickey is set to leave the firm at the end of the month as the fallout from the flights fiasco continues. Mr Hickey’s job was to schedule the pilots’ shifts. Former chief operations officer Peter Bellew takes his place.

‘Check-in bag fee to be cut by €10’