Ryanair: A Bird Strike, Refund Update, and A Rant
Photo by Monika Szyma
Three quick follow-up points to my post a few days ago on Ryanair, Europe’s low-cost budget airline.
Bird Strike
My skittish friend who will be taking a Ryanair flight in December forwarded me this story about a Ryanair bird strike from the BBC News.
What happened? A Ryanair flight on approach to Rome’s Ciampino airport suffered substantial damage after birds were sucked into the engine. The picture of the plane in the article is scary to look at — those birds really caused quite a bit of damage. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt.
Some of the comments on news articles about the incident wasted no time in mocking Ryanair — jokes like, “did they charge to use the emergency slide?” But all things considered, Ryanair deserves credit for a safe handling of an emergency situation. If anything, I’d be worried about flying into that airport.
Refund Update
One of the first posts I made on this blog concerned my quest to get my (rightful) refund of the check-in fee from Ryanair. To summarize, to get the refund, Ryanair requests that you mail or fax the request in; they emailed me back asking for more information (copy of passport page), which I provided. The refund should then post to my credit card that I originally used.
Did I ever get the refund? No, it never came, and it is now too costly to continue to pursue. I mailed them the additional information in April, and have not heard from them since. Given that they don’t accept email messages, and given how much it costs to mail or fax to Dublin from the United States, if I tried contacting them again, it would end up costing me more in stamps than the refund would be worth (not to mention the fact that the refund is worth less given the changes in the Dollar/Pound since the spring).
It bothers me to no end, but I have given up.
A Rant
I’m going to be honest — this situation really bothers me. Most of the time, companies go out of their way to make things right (even if they are not truly at fault!); Ryanair, on the other hand, seems to go out of its way to avoid dealing with customers. With this check-in fee, Ryanair is specifically targeting non-European passport holders with a fee that is low enough to make it easily not worth it to pursue the refund. I played by their rules, but have no real recourse at this point. I’ll accept it and move on, but I will remember this experience with future Ryanair dealings.
Anyone else want to share their Ryanair experiences?
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I had the same problem with Ryanair – traveling with a US passport and having to pay the “optional” airport check-in fee – and filed a complaint of discrimination with the Civil Aviation Authority in Britain and with the European Union’s consumer protection agency. They are required by both British and European law to not discriminate against people based on national origin.
However, the likely outcome of that, according to a response I got from CAA, is that they will investigate this fee and, if it is discriminatory, they will require Ryanair to change its practices. Essentially, Ryanair gets a free pass on charging that fee until it is pointed out to them that it’s illegal… which doesn’t help you or me any… but I would file a complaint with the authorities too, in the hopes that it helps some future traveller.
Oh, and just don’t fly Ryanair ever again. If everyone simply did this, they would evolve some basic humanity in their operations… or die out.