A District Court judge has labelled Ryanair’s booking practices “an absolute disgrace” in a small claims case taken by a woman who was seeking €950 from the airline.
On January 9th, Katie Graham booked return flights through the Ryanair app for her family to visit Turin, Italy, for a week-long skiing holiday in February.
She received a reservation number, a prompt to check in for the flight and instructions to get to the airport.
“I genuinely thought everything was okay. There were only three weeks between booking the flights and leaving for the holiday and I was very busy. I did not check back into anything until the day before when I went to check in and an error message saying ‘Oops, there’s a problem with your booking’ came up,” Ms Graham said.
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She drove to the airport with her husband at 11pm for the departure and tried to check in at the Ryanair desk. They told her that her booking was not successful and the flight to Turin was now full.
“We had a hotel booked, a car booked. The kids’ bags were packed. We were travelling with another family. It was an absolute nightmare,” she said.
Graham and her husband found an alternative: to fly to Milan, then drive to Turin, at a cost of €1,301.98.
“It did put a strain on the holiday, but we got on with it”, she told The Irish Times.
Ms Graham told the court at Balbriggan, Co Dublin that when she went to book the Turin flight in January she did not receive a pop-up message to say her payment had been denied and that as such her booking was not complete.
She told the court she wanted €950 for the cost of the Milan flights – which she said she booked arising from Ryanair’s error – to be returned to her.
Counsel for Ryanair said “ordinarily” a pop-up message would appear when the payment failed. However, the defence could not “definitively” say if there had been a technical error when Ms Graham was booking her flights.
Judge Stephanie Coggans noticed the “complete imbalance of power” between Ryanair and the claimant. She said her job was to “ensure as level a playing field as possible” in these matters.
It seemed reasonable to the judge that Ms Graham believed she had booked the Turin flights. She said Ms Graham’s claim “absolutely succeeds on the basis of not receiving the error message”.
However, a technical issue with Ms Graham’s banking app that had required her to use a family member’s card instead to book the flights to Milan meant the judge could not grant the relief sought as it was not Ms Graham’s bank account in question. “I want to do it, but I can’t”, Judge Coggans said.
Although Ms Graham said she was “quite disappointed”, she said the court was “really well run” and admired the judge’s attitude towards claimants.
In a separate hearing, passengers Joanna and Keith Troughton from Ballybrack, Co Dublin argued they should have received a last call when waiting at the gate in Dublin Airport to board their morning flight to London.
They were unaware of the boarding process and missed their Ryanair flight, costing them an extra €300 to buy new flights later that morning.
While again the judge disapproved of the way Ryanair had dealt with their complaint, she said the claimants should have double checked the flight was boarding at the gate.
“Something I see in the paperwork is Ryanair constantly using forceful methods of enforcement,” she said.
Speaking to the airline’s counsel, the judge said: “It wouldn’t kill [Ryanair] to be halfway polite to people.”
