Ryanair, checking out

[Mick S]

Hi, does anyone have any advice on where to go with this one?

A good friend of mine has recently been to Europe and whilst there one of his family members wasn’t too well. He looked into amending his Ryanair flights for the return leg but the price was coming back at £800. He decided to stick with the original date and not pay this ridiculous fee.

When arriving at the airport he was advised he had no booking, apparently he had “checked out” and the time of this check out corresponded with when he was looking at the new dates. He had to pay £200 to get back onto the original flight.

When arriving home he contacted Ryanair online to try and get this £200 back. He was contacted very quickly and the response was pretty much the same as at the airport, you had “checked out” and the fee is valid.

So a few things spring to mind
(1) he has not read the screen prompts properly, but he’s usually pretty astute with fine details etc
(2) crap IT from Ryanair, surely a check-out should only happen after the booking has been amended and a new flight is confirmed
(3) proper sh*t house tactics from Ryanair

Is there anything he can do here to take this further?

[Lady London]

What does checking out mean in this context anyway. It does not sound relevant. What, exactly, are they saying he did.

Plus if he performed any operation on his booking would have generated an email to him confirming.

I’d raise a formal complaint demanding they explain and prove what they say he did and state be made no change and received nothing from Ryanair confirming any supposed change.

How full was the flight? They may have been trumping up excuses to offload people. There’s usually a few no shows so perhaps they weren’t trying quite so hard by the time he made it to check in.

Demand the data trail including all devices involved as well if you want, under data subject access rights.

[Blair Waldorf Salad]

I wonder if they’re using so-called shoulder surfing technology on their website, watching what a user is doing before they’ve actually confirmed it. Either way I agree the lack of email confirmation is a strong leg to stand on and the DSAR will assist.

[WaynedP]

Any App (or similar customer interface) that results in inadvertently or unintentionally flagging the customer as an intended no-show (which sounds like it’s the case here) strikes me as consumer-inimical, which means it will breach consumer fairness regulations.

If this is genuinely the case (as opposed to momentary suspension of user intelligence) I would frame it like that in writing to Ryanair’s customer service and ask for a final written decision from them. If that doesn’t go in your favour, take it to Aviation ADR, an intention I would disclose without any hint of menace in my correspondence, just to signal that you are an informed consumer. It may carry no weight whatsoever, especially if phrased in a way that could be perceived as a threat, rather than a simple “your decision entirely, but I am already fully informed of my rights and do have a planned next step if your decision doesn’t comply with fair customer treatment as I interpret it”.

But it might sway a reasonable Ryanair decision-maker, especially if the case is set out succinctly, without any emotional content and succeeds in setting the petition well apart from the many chancers that they must necessarily deal with on a daily basis.

[JDB]

@Lady London – it is fairly unlikely Ryanair was looking to offload people as it has a policy of not overbooking which is consistent with it being a no refund airline.

[Lady London]

Yeah trouble is, been on a few Ryanair flights from STN where people were in tears as they and their family were offloaded at the gate very last minute due to overbooking. Or at least, that’s what they’d been told.

Ryanair did have that policy at that time too, my flights were summer season well over a decade ago IIRC.