Once upon a time, a very long time ago, or May 1998 if you want to be more precise, I took a flight with Ryanair from Birmingham to Dublin. It was, in fact, the first flight I had ever taken in my entire life and hence a rather exciting experience. A week later, I attempted to take my second ever flight from Dublin back to Birmingham, and it was here that the fun and games started.

My family and I arrived at Dublin airport in good time and searched for our flight on the departure boards. For some strange reason, it didn’t appear to be showing at the time at which we had expected it. Curious. Eventually, a bit unnerved, my mother went over the a customer information desk and enquired. Customer Services proceeded to deny point blank that our flight existed. My mother duly produced the tickets. Customer Services then clarified that our flight had indeed once existed, but had since been cancelled. These were the good old days when you had proper paper tickets and had to go to a travel agent to purchase them. The travel agent had not informed us that our flight had been cancelled, or perhaps more accurately, Ryanair had not informed the travel agent. The time/day of the flight had been randomly moved without us knowing, and thus we had missed it.

The prospect of being stranded in Dublin airport was not one that appealed, and after various arguments between my mother and Ryanair staff, we were booked onto a new flight. There followed a mad dash across the airport to try and make it, which culminated in us actually running out onto the runway, so lax was airport security in those days But ultimately we missed that flight too and had to sit around in the airport for many boring hours before Ryanair condescended to fly us home.

Over the past ten years, Ryanair has metamorphosed from a slightly dodgy airline which sold flights to Ireland slightly cheaper than Aer Lingus, to the incredibly dodgy European budget airline that it is today. A lot of things have changed, from the online check-in system to the staff’s desire to sell you scratch cards during the flight. It appears that some things, however, remain the same.

Babel booked our flights from East Midlands to Prague in January and got a very good deal on them with Ryanair. I was pleased that he had organised it so far in advance and thus saved us money Something went slightly wrong with the booking, and in a moment of confusion he entered the first half of his personal email address followed by the second half of his work email address, but at the end of the day I didn’t think that this was a big issue. What could possibly go wrong which would require Ryanair to contact us?

Hmmm. Well the holiday is getting closer now, and as I was in the process of putting together a private webpage from which we will be able to download all our travel documents and itineraries, I randomly ended up on the Ryanair website on Wednesday night. I was confident that our flights were correctly booked, but sometimes flight times do change by half an hour here or half an hour there, so I decided to log into the Ryanair system and check. There are three different ways in which you can manage your Ryanair booking, two of which involve entering the places you are flying from and to, together with some personal details. I tried it these ways multiple times, but my input of East Midlands to Prague was continually rejected as incorrect. How strange

Eventually I had to opt for the third method which was more of a hassle because I needed the reservation number and Babel’s card details. It took me a while but eventually I located the necessary information and logged in. I was relieved to see that my flights were still there, but imagine my surprise when I noticed that I was now flying from BIRMINGHAM to Prague, and on FRIDAY 17th July rather than Saturday 18th!!!

I stared at the computer screen in confusion for some time, trying to absorb what had happened. Seemingly Ryanair had cancelled the flight we had purchased and allocated us a different flight on a different day from a different airport How rude! A bit of further investigation on their website confirmed the worst – the airline is due to stop operating the route between East Midlands and Prague before Babel and I are due to fly. The only Ryanair flight from the UK to Prague on the day we had booked to travel is from London Stansted at 6am, hence, I suppose, them reallocating us to a geographically more convenient flight from Brum.

But on a different day?! I knew there was a real chance I wouldn’t be allowed to have the Friday off work, and if so I stood to lose a lot of money, as well as having the disappointment of a ruined holiday.

In a bit of a panic I spoke to Babel and he recommended that I give Ryanair a call. I duly did so the next day, but I might as well not have bothered. As Damon so rightly said on my Facebook status, their customer service policy equates to the two words, “Fuck off!”.

Yes, my flight had been cancelled. Yes, I had been given another flight. Yes, this was the most convenient flight available for me and they’d gone above their obligations by transferring me to it with no extra charge. No, I couldn’t have my money back if I wanted to cancel it. Well, only the government tax back, but that would be subject to an admin fee for processing the refund. No, they didn’t think this was slightly unreasonable, nor did they think it was their fault that I stood to lose £65 Babel had already paid for airport parking at an airport we were now no longer flying from.

GRRR!

I had to hang up before I exploded :cry:

The situation was eventually resolved by my manager allowing me to have the Friday off work, but that’s not the point and we’ve still been put to a lot of inconvenience. Our return flight was booked from Wroclaw to East Midlands on the assumption our car would be there. It now won’t be, so we’ll arrive at East Midlands some time around midnight and have to check into a hotel. If I hadn’t thought we needed to fly back to East Midlands, there’s no way on this earth I would have booked a flight from Wroclaw which is not in the remote vicinity of Bialystok. Etc etc etc.

The upshot is that I will never, ever be flying Ryanair again. If anyone else has any horror stories, feel free to share…

Tags: flights, IJK, Ryanair

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Esperanto, Holidays and outings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.