Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. I'm Simon Calder and you are very welcome.

I'm taking the story that I discussed yesterday just a little bit further today, if I may,

because there has simply been so much interest and comment on it. Let me remind you of the topic.

Last Friday morning, Ruth Jaff, who's 79, and her disabled husband, Peter Jaff, who's 80,

turned up at Stansted Airport to fly with Ryanair to Bergerac in southwest France.

They had been warned in advance if you don't check

in online, then you are going to have to pay 55 pounds on arrival at the airport as our

check-in fee. Well, they thought that they had complied with the rules. Ruth had gone through everything, checked in, printed out and so on.

She thought she was fine, but in fact she had mistakenly printed out the inbound boarding passes.

As a result, the ground staff at Stansted Airport just said,

oh, you haven't checked in for this flight.

We can do it for you.

It's going to cost you a total of £110, as we warned you.

As discussed, Ruth and Peter were very upset by this.

It was, of course, an inadvertent error, the sort of honest mistake that all sorts of people could make, particularly perhaps if they are towards the older end of the spectrum.

But it's excited a lot of interest.

And I put out a Twitter poll, I guess we have to say, I put out a poll on the social media site X,

formerly known as Twitter. And it's very interesting with 9,000 votes in. I said,

what's your view on Ryanair imposing it its £55 per passenger fee for issuing a boarding pass at the airport.

66% say unfair, it's an honest mistake.

One in three, 34% actually, say them's the rules, what do you expect? And I kind of wish that I'd

actually put in another category which is fair enough to have this policy, but 55 is £5 is excessive.

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