Yet once again:
Why did Ryanair refuse my mother a wheelchair?
On Friday night my mother was flying from Pisa to Dublin, and unable to walk due to a sudden hip injury, she asked Ryanair for a wheelchair at the airport to help her board: they refused. And I'd like to know why.
The customer wrote a letter to CEO Michael O'Leary and published it
here.
I'd like to comment on that.
Our lives consist of pieces, like a puzzle game. These pieces reflect all our experiences with variety of people we met, events and places we witness. To build the puzzle of life we use different kinds of blocks according to our personal estimation. Some features, situations or behaviors we consider good, other things are for us neutral or negative. We build our image of everything, institutions as well, airlines are not an exception.
Ryanair has been perceived as positive by many; it's cheap and affordable for the great majority of people, it is mostly punctual as well, it allows the clients save considerable amount of money they can spend later at the destination. However, the bargain price as the only argument is just not enough for many others. Expressing it sparingly, the Ryanair's imperfectness pertains to the vast territory of customer relations that for FR is seemingly insignificant. The carelessness about what happens to some of the passengers traveling aboard of their planes is unfair and cannot last (for their own sake as well). Such carelessness comes always at a price, albeit the cost is not measurable directly in euros or pounds.
There are just a few things that every airline has to avoid. Harsh or aversive behaviours in the interpersonal relationships (especially while dealing with children, disabled or sick people) always produce unproportional amounts of contradictory publicity that costs much more then it is worth, even in terms of money.
As such things happen, more and more people keep adding the negative pieces to the puzzle while building the Ryanair's image in their minds. Considering its ambitions to overpass others and become a leader in Europe, RYR should change its conduct right away, not allowing the potential customers to look for other carriers. It's still possible to prevent a shift in mind of many customers from any degree of acceptance or even admiration towards much more negative attitudes which are usually hard to reverse.
Keeping its image positive, as passenger-friendly airline, should in my opinion become one of Ryanair's priorities.
PS. My apologies for a possible roughness of this difficult text (I'm not a native English speaker).