Renowned Irish budget airline, Ryanair, is again under fire after it charged an elderly couple over AU$200 for downloading the wrong boarding passes.
Peter and Ruth Jaffe, aged 80 and 79 respectively, told a BBC Radio 4 presenter they were forced to pay the fee after mistakenly downloading their return boarding passes rather than their outgoing tickets when flying from Stansted to Bergerac last week.
Mrs Jaffe said the Ryanair website was “very confusing”, though she thought she had correctly printed the departure boarding passes the day before the flight and didn’t realise she had the wrong tickets until she arrived at the airport.
“I was then told that I had to go to the Ryanair desk to get a boarding card, and there they charged me £55 (AU$108 per person)”, she said.
“[I was] horrified.”
The couples daughter posted about the incident on X (F.K.A Twitter), prompting a response from a Ryanair spokesperson, “All passengers travelling with Ryanair agree to check-in online before arriving at their departure airport and all passengers are sent an email/SMS, reminding them to do so 24hrs before departure,” it read.
“We regret that these passengers ignored their email reminder and failed to check-in online.”
https://t.co/UbGaub0WAD pic.twitter.com/GywErHbZmO
— Ryanair (@Ryanair) August 14, 2023
Some thought the excess charges were out of line, stating on X, “It (really) F***s me off how Ryanair’s social media have used clever marketing little jokes to get away with treating its customers like pieces of s**t to extract profits from and people just lap it up.”
Others, however, believe it is par for the course of budget airlines, “this statement is so patronising, but you can’t really expect much from a budget airline that sells you £20 tickets.”
