Solution is publicised now - if they lose on appeal they will stop printing boarding passes, for any money. No pass, no fly. I suspect that (a) they are absolutely serious and (b) it will be a struggle to prove that approach illegal (bit of a case of be careful what you wish for...).

Not sure what they will do for rebooking at the airport for cancelled flights, last minute ticket sales at the airport etc. - but then I'm not sure they do any of that anyway.

I find FR's press release on 18 January unsatisfying in that
a) Point 3 - a court will likely ignore any kind of "if we don't win this case, we'll be even more awkward in the future" argument. The case is about what's happened in the past, not what one might choose to do in future.
b) Point 4 seems to ignore the principle of law over contract - namely that if a clause of commercial contract goes against a law, then the law takes precedence and the courts get to decide what to do about the contract.
An extreme example of this would be a written contract for person A giving food and shelter to person B, in return for B agreeing to become the permanent slave of A without freedom to leave. Slavery is banned, so is B still obliged to be a slave to A, or does a court have the right to modify / void the contract ?


Leaving the above issue to lawyers to debate....

Given that the average fare + tax + fees comes to more than £40 / 40 EUR, a passenger being refused passage means that Ryanair effectively gets to keep *all* the money the passenger paid, as the admin charge makes reclaiming any tax futile.

Furthermore, some of the passengers who forget their boarding card will have done so on their outbound flight, so Ryanair may get to keep the tax + fees for the return leg as well, since a one-way fare booked at less than 24 hours notice is usually very expensive meaning a passenger who booked a cheapie ticket may just abandon the whole trip. In any case, a passenger who has to pay a reissue fee on an outbound will damn well make sure to get the boarding card for the return leg printed off.

Ignoring the detrimental effect of seriously annoying some customers and making them reluctant to fly with FR again (not that that has worried FR very much in the past), I could see the policy of "if you don't bring the print-out to the airport, then you don't fly at all" policy as being almost as profitable as the £40 / 40 EUR reissue charge...

Not sure the court is the intended audience for the quote - more directed at plaintiff(s).

I think they are saying that the court can't start arbitrarily rewriting the rest of the contract, which is probably true. The T&Cs contain a standard boiler-plate clause about the rest of the terms standing if others are ruled invalid - mind you they also contain a standard jurisdiction clause (ireland) which fallen by the wayside somewhere since we're now talking about a spanish court.

If the court says the re-issue fee is an unfair term, then it can't be enforced, and the end result is probably no-pass-no-fly - nothing else I can see obliges them to issue one. In fact even the offending clause only states that they will re-issue "if there is sufficient time".

This topic has just given me the idea - I will print the boarding pass for my next not-so-important FR flight on my A6 thermal printer. Will see how small a boarding pass will still be valid... :) One time the handling agent had the problem with the boarding pass (for another no-frills airline) printed on one sheet instead of two, but I talked him into accepting it.

MikeJuliet,

Ryanair are way ahead of you. From their T&Cs....

6.1 All passengers are required to check-in on-line and print out their Boarding Pass. This facility is available from 15 days up to the online Check-In Deadline of four (4) hours before each scheduled flight departure time. Each Boarding Pass must be printed and presented on an individual A4 page. No further changes can be made to passenger name(s), flight dates, times and route once a Passenger has checked in online.

I had cause to check out the rules a while ago when my printer wasn't printing very good copies and I was worried about what would happen if my boarding pass was unreadable. When I got to Stansted, as I feared, the security staff's machine couldn't read it (and the staff were really quite unpleasant about it). Ryanair were, though, remarkably helpful, printing me out a new one without fuss and without charge. From the information on this thread, I suspect that I might not be so lucky next time.

Which means that if it's printed on a 20 ys old dot matrix printer, they still have to accept it or print another one themselves - and AFAIK the charge is for not having the boarding pass with you according to T&C, not for the very fact of printing it by FR staff. To put it another way, they cannot charge you for the flaws in their barcode readers ;)

Ryanair charging for baggage twice??
 

Booked Ms Smoketrails on RYR from CRL to LPA last summer and can't remember having to pay for baggage on both sectors!? Want to book her for the end of march and are now asking me 20 quid for both sectors and not one set price for 15 kilo's of baggage!? Am I imagining things?

Have you (or Madame) bothered to read Ryanair's terms and conditions yet? It is they that will form the basis of any contract to carry a passenger - and her baggage.

If a carrier charges for carrying a passenger's baggage in the hold it will be highly probable that it will charge for every leg of the trip. In any case Ryanair regards each sector travelled as a separate contract.

Chuchinchow,

Thanks for the quick reply! But you haven't answerd my question...

just,
 

done a booking CRL - LPA. Total cost In Euros 46.99 including 1 Bag Max 15k , not quite sure where you get both sectors from , unless you are returning then that is classed as a seperate flight P,S. add on a charge for your charge card .:ok:

Yes, I have. Here, once again, is the answer to most simple, ticketing-related, problems:
You can lead a horse to water . .

Good Flying
 

For all peoples' opinions about Ryanair and its management procedures, etc., you can't fault the professionalism of the people who work at the sharp end. Well done to the crew who performed a very tricky landing at Prestwick this evening on the return from Lanzagrote - I felt for you every time the wing dropped! I'm not sure whether there was a crosswind or not but there was enough windshear for the most evil of training captains - well done!

Presume they landed on RW 21 - quite a sporty wind but at least PIK has two runways at 90 degrees to each other unlike many other airports now!

I understand that Ryanair gets well over 90% of its sales from its website. I believe that most LCCs either achieve or strive for a similiar figure.

I note also that for most LCCs, the booking part of the website is usually pretty reliable - conventional business theory says it's a good idea for a company to make it easy for its customers to spend money and buy the product. I realise that very high levels of reliability of a website also cost money

I know FR is very keen on keeping its costs as low as possible, but I would expect the unreliability of FR's booking website comes down to one or maybe a few root causes.

Does anyone know what these root causes are, and is there a plan to do anything about it ?
Is it
1 - Ryanair chose the absolute cheapest of solutions as offered by the vendor
2 - Ryanair doesn't have sufficient hardware to power the website
3 - The software vendor chosen is rubbish
4 - The support agreement in place is not sufficiently robust
5 - Ryanair's staff did a poor job of integrating the booking system into their existing IT systems
6 - The website was designed for 30 million sectors per year and either cannot be easily scaled up, or FR don't want to pay to scale it up ot the current 70+ million sectors per year
7 - There are a few known simple bugs in the booking system for which the vendor is asking for absurdly large sums of money to fix
8 - Ryanair doesn't care about its sales system
9 - Something else

Mrs OFSO, with ailing parents in the UK, used to fly FR every month from Girona to London and back, or sometimes Perpignan to London and back. On time, cheap, nasty.

But then we switched to the TGV, Perpignan via Paris to London. A bit longer (9-10hrs door to door), twice the price at least, but first-class luxury & very comfortable.

Yesterday thought we'd give FR a try again, so I booked a return flight for Mrs OFSO in March, Girona - London.

Today the FR website announces that in a fit of pique against the Catalan government (well it doesn't say that but we all know O'Leary) that effective the end of Febuary this will apply:


18 Routes Cancelled

Aarhus
Dusseldorf Weeze
Gdansk
Hamburg Lubeck
Ibiza
Kristianstad
Lanzarote
Lille
London Gatwick
Madrid
Oslo Torp
Perugia
Plovdiv
Poitiers
Seville
Szczecin
Tenerife
Vasteras


..so there's my booked flight in the bin.

O'Leary has a fight with the hand that feeds him, he takes reprisals, and the poor saps like me who already bought a ticket and thought their contract with Ryanair actually meant something......well, "count for nothing" would be a fair expression. Of course it could be on again next week, but who knows ? My opinion of O'Leary's ethics is unprintable.

Goodbye, Ryanair, for the second time, and this time I mean it.

OFSO - so Ryanair in mid-February have decided to scrap all those routes as from the end of February - ie. in two weeks time ?

That's a lot of their passengers plans stuffed then - will be expensive to book with alternative carriers at this short notice.

I recall Ryanair having a cull of their Basle routes around the festive season a couple of years back, with a similar short period of notice.

Yes, from the end of February they are cancelled (source FR website and Catalan TV) plus another large group of destinations reduced to minimal service.

No sign yet of those flights being switched to Barcelona (Prat) airport either.

Mr O'Leary's concern for his passengers is overwhelming.

OFSO

Contract law does apply to your transaction with Cryanair. If you can prove damages you have the right to seek redress. You are not likely to cover your costs, but if you've got the time and the will ...

Contract law doesn't mean a damn to Ryanair.

Looking at the dates and times, Ryanair sold me a ticket for the flights next month AFTER they had announced on their website that the flights were permanently cancelled. If I had clicked on 'news' or watched Catalan teletext TV I would have seen it, but who expects to be sold a product by a company which knows full well it can't fulfil the sale ?

OFSO - could I ask whether you have received an email from Ryanair saying your flight has been cancelled, or checked the status of your booking on the airline website ?

The booking system currently seems to show that flights operated from Girona to Gatwick daily up to Tuesday 3rd May. From 4th May onward, no flights seem to be on sale.

I don't have any inside information on this, but I'm wondering whether Ryanair have simply been overly dramatic on the press release announcing that everything will be cancelled rather faster than is actually the case