I would have expected the change to be at no charge.
The terms and conditions that were agreed by the person buying the ticket may state otherwise. Have you checked the Ts&Cs against your expectations?
There should have been no commercial aspect to it.
At the risk of referring the honourable gentleman to my earlier reply, WHY? The carrier have decided that there IS a commercial aspect to it.
It just needed someone with the authority to make a brief phone-call and hand-write a new boarding card, resulting in a slightly happier customer.
We have been told by
groundhand that EZY do not have staff of that kind available air-side, probably because that would increase their costs and EZY are a ...?
Really, lower cost should not be an excuse for failure to apply commonsense. Sadly, it appears to be.
Common sense and extra staff are part of history. The great British public decided (in concert with every other human being on the planet) that they wanted to get more flying for less cost. Your wife met the place where the cost and the service meet. That balance point can sometimes be changed by a member of staff exceeding their authority. But, if they did it for this case, they have to do it for every case and that is not what LCCs do. What happens to staff that consistently exceed their authority? They lose promotion and, possibly, their job.
Yes it is frustrating but many of us have been through similar. On one occasion I missed a flight because I was delayed in traffic and had to wait for the next but they managed to put me on at no extra cost, as that flight was not heavily loaded and I was, of course, still land-side. On another occasion, I had to pay a penalty but that is what the deal is.