Ryanair: after the bonfire of the boarding passes, time to grow up

The airline has been ‘persistently misleading passengers with inaccurate information regarding their rights’, according to the CAA

On the slide: Michael O’Leary’s cheeky chappie schtick has worn thin among his aggrieved passengers

Thinking of starting an airline? Probably best to go and lie down in a darkened room until you come to your senses. But if you persist with the plan, allow me to offer some advice on practices best avoided.

1) Cancelling dozens of flights at almost no notice, leaving thousands of passengers stranded and, in many cases, out of pocket.

2) Messing up pilots’ rosters so badly that you need to cancel 2,100 flights over a six-week spell at the end of the summer season.

3) Saying that the winter schedule is safe, launching a £10 seat sale on flights from November onwards, and then cancelling an astounding 18,000 more flights.

On several days this summer, British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair have all been guilty of the first issue, grounding planes abruptly. But only the Irish airline has achieved the second and third feat as well.

Wrecking the plans of around 800,000 passengers in a bonfire of the boarding passes is never a good idea. Yet many of the mucked-around Ryanair customers might have been mollified had the airline simply done the decent (and legally required) thing.

Before you launch your airline, have a quick look at the European passengers’ rights rules that govern every flight on an EU carrier. Essentially, they insist that disrupted passengers should be cared for promptly and properly, at no cost to themselves, and that anyone whose flight is cancelled should be offered three options.

First, a refund; unlikely to be the best choice, because alternative transport will probably cost more. Next, an alternative flight on the same airline. But if that isn’t possible – for example because all departures on a route have been grounded between November and March – then the cancelling airline must buy a ticket on a rival carrier.

Anyone with a Ryanair ticket from Stansted to Edinburgh or Glasgow, or between Gatwick and Belfast, should be switched with neither fuss nor need for a credit card, to easyJet; the airline flies exactly the same routes at broadly similar times. Mildly inconvenient, perhaps, but not the stuff of travel nightmares.

Instead of doing the decent thing, though, Ryanair went out of its way to avoid shelling out on seats aboard its competitors’ flights.

The airline redefined “staff shortage” by mismanaging pilots’ rosters so badly that it needed to cancel 20,000 flights. Judging from its recent behaviour, therefore, you may conclude that Ryanair hasn’t a clue what it is doing.

Yet in one respect the airline knows exactly what it has been doing: “persistently misleading passengers with inaccurate information regarding their rights”, according to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). The 400,000 passengers who had booked winter trips with Ryanair in good faith were emailed on Monday to be told their flights were grounded and that they had just two choices: another Ryanair flight, or a refund. Which is why the CAA’s normally mild-mannered chief executive, Andrew Haines, declared himself “furious”.

For the vast majority of travellers, switching airlines is the obvious solution. But with far fewer seats available between Stansted and Scotland, and Gatwick and Northern Ireland, easyJet is naturally raising its fares. Now that Ryanair has agreed to respect passengers’ rights, I estimate around £20m will be added to the steadily rising bill for the mother-of-all-airline-management muddles.

Ryanair will barely notice as it flies through the turbulence towards another billion pounds in profit; a tiny portion earned from me, an avid enthusiast for safe, on-time and good-value flights.

But when an airline has been systematically seeking to avoid its obligations on an industrial scale, the “cheeky, cheap and cheerful” image no longer applies. It’s time to grow up.

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