September 19th - Ryanair still won't compromise
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ryanair are back in the news with the airline’s no-compromise attitude to online check-in. This concerns Damian Lloyd and his family, who were told their pre-printed boarding passes were not valid and that they would have to pay £165 if they wanted to fly to Gran Canaria. Ryanair says they had “unchecked” themselves the day before travel; Mr Lloyd says he has no such recollection. My thoughts ahead of a Ryanair flight …
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder in a very, |
| 0:08.4 | very long and winding security queue at Newcastle Airport. That's sort of relevant because I'm |
| 0:16.2 | in the queue because I'm travelling on Ryanair to Dublin and Ryanair have been in the news yet again for an |
| 0:24.4 | issue to do with online checking you might recall that it that Ryanair actually invented |
| 0:32.2 | mandatory online checking about 15 years ago they suddenly said said, right, yeah, we want to cut costs. |
| 0:40.3 | Good way to do that is to get rid of all the people, many of the people we've got sitting around at airports, checking you in. |
| 0:47.3 | So therefore, would you mind checking in yourself? Oh and by the way, if you don't, if you choose not to, as Ryanair would put it, |
| 0:56.5 | then you are going to have to, well, unfortunately, pay us quite a lot of money. That charge is |
| 1:04.4 | now 55 pounds and you'll possibly recall the case of Peter and Ruth Joff, who an elderly couple in their 80s, |
| 1:18.3 | who had inadvertently checked in for the inbound flight at Stansett Airport rather than the outbound flight, |
| 1:29.3 | and they were similarly charged 110 pounds in line with the rules we've got another really interesting case here which is involving |
| 1:35.2 | somebody called Damien lloyd and his family they were going to grand canaria and they thought |
| 1:42.2 | they checked in they had everything ready damien's a very long-serving Ryanair customer, as I am, |
| 1:50.0 | and he knew that he had everything right. |
| 1:53.0 | But suddenly they found, when they handed over the paper boarding passes, |
| 1:58.0 | that they wouldn't scan. and it was early in the morning |
| 2:03.2 | so what was going to happen well the hapless brown staff member kept trying couldn't call anybody |
| 2:10.2 | in uh ryan there apparently because it's too early and he said look i'm very sorry the only thing |
| 2:15.5 | you can do is um actually pay me the money to check you in. |
| 2:21.2 | And then hopefully you'll be able to go back to Ryanair and figure out what the problem was and get your money back. |
| 2:26.8 | I think a reasonable attitude. |
| 2:30.3 | I mean, not reasonable from the £165 that Damien had to pay, but you can kind of see the logic to it. |
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