Better luck next time! Ryanair’s £3.50 online quiz you can’t win
RYANAIR has been caught fooling passengers with an online competition that’s impossible to win.
All three potential answers in the multiple- choice promotion – which offers free flights as prizes – were incorrect.
Darren Coyle, 32, discovered the blunder after paying £3.50 to play the quiz while booking flights online.
He was planning a holiday to Benidorm with his friend Chris Matthews, 31, and was swayed by the chance to enter a weekly draw to win back the value of his £330 tickets.
But after selecting a wrong answer to the quiz question, he later discovered that his chances of picking a correct one had been zero.
Ryanair asked: ‘Together with the recently purchased new Boeing aircrafts, how many planes will Ryanair’s fleet contain in 2024?’ The possible answers offered were 380, 420 or 450. Mr Coyle guessed 420, which was deemed incorrect.
But when he later typed the question into Google, he found a page on the airline’s website revealing that the actual answer was 520.
Feeling aggrieved that he had paid £3.50 to enter an impossible quiz, Mr Coyle complained to Ryanair’s head office. Bosses replied with a shamefaced letter, admitting their mistake and refunding his entrance money.
Mr Coyle, who works as a plant manager, said: ‘They are Con-Air. If I’d not complained they would have kept it.’
The married father- of- one, from Loanhead, near Edinburgh, added: ‘They are chancers. How many other people have taken a chance and ended up £3.50 down and forgotten about it?’
A spokesman for the budget airline said it was investigating how a promotion without a correct answer ended up on its website. Ironically, the blunder comes just days before Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary is due to unveil its new ‘passenger charter’ in a bid to address its poor reputation.
Pledging to improve customer service, he said: ‘We were maybe a little bit cheap and nasty. We have spent a lot of time and effort try- ing to be cheap and a little bit better.’ The airline has frequently been the subject of high-profile rumours about changes it might i ntroduce, i ncluding reports that passengers could be charged to use the toilet during flights.