Ryanair farce: Families wait 9 days to get home
Holidaymakers forced to pay up to £30 just to call helpline
RYANAIR’s response to the flights cancellation crisis descended into farce yesterday as families complained of having to wait up to nine days for a flight home.
In another day of shame for the airline, furious passengers complained of being stranded abroad and left hundreds of pounds out of pocket.
Holidaymakers reported being reduced to tears after being unable to get home, while many complained of being kept on hold on Ryanair’s premium rate helpline, being given incorrect information, or of problems with its refunds service.
Those forced to ring the company’s helpline face spiralling charges, with one Mail reporter’s call costing more than £30.
And yesterday the airline admitted that around 140,000 passengers whose flights have been cancelled still have not been booked on another flight.
The misery endured by holidaymakers prompted the aviation minister to ramp up the pressure on Ryanair, which has caused further outrage by refusing to rebook passengers on rival airlines.
In some cases this has left passengers with the choice of waiting for days for another Ryanair flight or shelling out hundreds of pounds in air fares.
The budget airline’s chief executive Michael O’Leary has claimed the firm is not obliged to rebook passengers on rival airlines under EU rules, adding that it ‘cannot afford to pay the high costs of its competitors’.
But in a strongly worded letter to Mr O’Leary, the Aviation Minister Lord Callanan said he was ‘disappointed about the way Ryanair has dealt with the situation’ and said the airline’s actions have ‘led to disruption and uncertainty for many travellers’.
He added: ‘In the event of any disruption or cancellation, airlines must ensure customers are fully compensated ... This includes offering to re-book passengers to flights with other airlines, if this is appropriate.’ The intervention comes after the airline industry watchdog the Civil Aviation Authority also raised fears that Ryanair’s ‘express intention was to fail to meets its obligations’ under EU rules’.
If Ryanair backs down, its compensation bill – which it has estimated at £17.7million – could soar.
Customers yesterday described the stress of not knowing how to get home and being forced to spend huge sums of money after getting marooned. stella scott, 69, was told six hours before her flight and was offered seats to the UK nine days later, leaving her family, including her three-yearold grandson, stranded.
Rhiannon Hawkins, 19, ‘cried herself to sleep’ after she was forced to cut her week’s holiday in France short having spent £25 waiting for an answer on Ryanair’s helpline.
The airline’s 0871 premium rate helpline charges up to 68p per minute from UK mobiles and more if called from abroad. Ryanair takes 13p per minute from these calls – the maximum allowed under Ofcom rules. On top of that phone companies add their own service charge. For example, EE charges 50p a minute.
It took one Daily Mail reporter 48 minutes to reach an operator after initially dialling the number.
As a result the call, made from an EE phone, cost £30.24 - £6.24 in access charge – going to Ryanair – and £24 in EE’s service charge.
Responding to criticism, a spokesman for Ryanair said: ‘Our reservations number costs 13p per minute and our other UK number is a low-cost local rate number.
‘We ask customers to bear with us as we do everything we can to respond to their requests.’
The Dublin-based carrier yesterday said it expected to have booked more than 175,000 customers onto other flights and to have processed refunds for more than 20 per cent of those affected by the end of the day.
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