People's opinions will always be coloured by their personal experiences and EI has never been good at managing things in a crisis but, to be fair, they've had such inept management over the years, that's no suprise.
You're really starting to tick me off now and it's time to get a few things straight here..
I'm beginning to think that ''your friend'' as you put it, may instead be yourself. The real case here is that you have an anti Aer Lingus agenda and you are using the volcanic ash crisis to push it..
The text message should have been more than enough evidence for him that the flight was not going ahead. The text is initiated from Ops centre immediately and provides the most up to date information. People can't sit on the Aer Lingus website and edit it every second you know. I got several of those texts a few weeks ago when my flight was cancelled - they were clear, to the point, apologetic and explained what to do next. With regard to phonecalls, what do you honestly expect here? People to work 12 hour days? Did Ryanair have a 24 hour phoneline open? Its about time you got real.
How is it reasonable to book passengers on the next available flight? If they had onward connections to SYD or somewhere like that for example then they may wish to stay in DUB overnight and go the next day, etc etc.. He wasn't interested about the extra capacity that Aer Lingus deployed on LHR or didn't want to hear because he knew he was in the wrong, 100% likely to be the latter here. So what if there were more in the party than two? Again, such comments are more vitriol. It would have taken a half an hour to get to the Port and catch a ferry to Holyhead. They could have been in London by the afternoon/early evening.
Your points on the closure of the airports that the planes were stranded at are valid but it could also be argued that having so many aircraft out of position was poor decision-making.
Now, the above comment really just takes the biscuit. Poor decision making? To politely put this to you, how do you think Aer Lingus could land the aircraft at DUB when the airport was closed? They did their best to get passengers out to the destinations - that's solid customer service. If they did try to land back at DUB and there was an incident related to ash contamination, people like you, or should I say ''your friend'' would be at the top of the queue to bring a litigation case against Aer Lingus.
Your final comments show the real purpose and motivation behind your posts. What the hell does this have to do with Aer Lingus management? You may not have noticed but they have quite a solid management team at the moment. I have, been scheduled on various Aer Lingus flights over the time that were disrupted and have received nothing but helpful information and assistance.
There's no substance to anything you have posted, your comments are not only inaccurate, but are dervived from an obvious agenda to besmirch the reputation of Aer Lingus.