Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has admitted the cancellation of flights due to pilot holidays is ‘a mess’
The sight of Ryanair’s egotistical chief executive, Michael O’Leary, waving his arms around and admitting the cancellation of up to 55 flights a day for six weeks is ‘clearly a mess’ will not reassure passengers.
As many as 400,000 people are likely to be affected, their autumn breaks, business trips or visits to family overseas thrown into chaos because Ryanair has spectacularly mismanaged its pilot and crew rotas.
It’s an appalling state of affairs for travellers who booked in good faith and have a perfect right to expect their flights to take off on the day they were advertised.
Yet perhaps, after years of problems with airlines, none of this should come as much of a surprise.
Chaotic
Yes, no-frills carriers such as Ryanair and easyJet have delivered flights at prices consumers could once only have dreamed of.
But in doing so, the airlines seem to have given up on any pretence of politeness and customer service, finding ever more devious ways to make money from luggage, hand baggage, food and drink.
The plane operators are only too happy to take our bank details, charge us for the privilege even of using credit cards, and then make it as difficult as possible to get our money back when the flights are cancelled, never mind actually pay compensation when flights are badly delayed.
Ryanair has, of course, long been loathed by many flyers who hate its extra charges for every last thing, and a corporate attitude that too often seems to treat customers as little more than irritating cash cows.
Ryanair will drop 40-50 flights a day over the next six weeks, leaving passengers stranded or out of pocket
This scandalous mass cancellation of flights comes on top of worsening punctuality, with Ryanair admitting its record has dropped to below 70 per cent.
At least yesterday Michael O’Leary had the good grace — or, at least, the PR savvy — to get in front of television cameras and apologise for the bedlam over his carrier’s cancelled flights.
Yes, he admitted to the ‘reputational’ damage caused, but many will say his airline didn’t have much of a reputation to lose.
When British Airways suffered its own public relations disaster back in May, the boss didn’t even deign to appear in public.
No one involved will easily forget the shambolic events at Heathrow over the Whitsun bank holiday, when an IT meltdown left 75,000 passengers stranded at the airport, struggling with children, piles of luggage and a virtual news blackout.
The airline’s Spanish chief executive, Alex Cruz, was nowhere to be seen because he was allegedly taking personal charge of sorting out the computer meltdown.
His failure to offer heartfelt apologies, and the increasing remoteness of Willie Walsh, boss of the airline’s parent company, only added to customers’ anger.
The explanation which emerged from BA, after one of the most embarrassing computer fiascos of recent times, was that human error has to blame.
An engineer from an outside contractor was said to have disconnected the power supply, and the surge which followed the reconnection blew out the whole system.
British Airways promised a full ‘independent’ investigation to find out the facts and make sure the same disaster doesn’t happen again.
The probe has now been completed, but BA’s customers, ground staff, air crews and shareholders have no means of knowing the nitty-gritty detail of what happened.
The very least that could have been expected was publication of the report (leaving out sensitive commercial details), but so far there have been no full explanations, and compensation has been agonisingly slow.
Coming as it did on the back of a series of service reductions, the suspicion has always been that the IT meltdown was the consequence of cost-cutting. That would certainly ring true for the British Airways customers who have seen traditional free meals on short-haul flights replaced with Marks & Spencer sandwiches for which they have to pay.
Which brings us back to airlines’ obsession with chasing profits.
Ryanair suddenly removed 160 scheduled services to destinations across Europe on Fridays furious (stock photo)
They will all argue that the use of advanced IT systems for making reservations, checking baggage allowances and the costs of add-ons has made life simpler for passengers. But nothing could be further from the truth — it’s all about the bottom line.
By shifting responsibility for reservations from airlines and travel agents to passengers, the airlines have been able to make huge cost savings and, in doing so, boost their profits and dividends.
(For Michael O’Leary, who owns just under 4 per cent of the shares in Ryanair, Europe’s largest carrier, that is money in his pocket.)
Meltdown
So is anyone able to crack down on the shoddiest practices that can make flying such a woeful experience, and ensure that there really are consequences for failure?
As private companies quoted on the stock market, the ultimate sanction for airlines is that dissatisfied customers vote with their feet, sales and profits plummet, and carriers find themselves in serious difficulty.
Ryanair chief marketing officer Kenny Jacobs said the company will ‘continue to send regular updates’ to passengers
But there are also regulations imposed by Brussels — which sets the terms of passenger compensation — and from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in the UK. Ryanair and Michael O’Leary are smart enough to have designed their flight cancellations in order to have minimised their liability to compensate passengers under those EU rules.
But even if there is an open-and-shut case for refunds or compensation, passengers must go through a laborious online or telephone process to get back their money.
This requires infinite patience and simply piles on the blood-boiling inconvenience that starts when a flight is delayed or cancelled.
Shambolic
When Ryanair passengers seek compensation, they are first directed to re-booking, presumably in the hope that they are still willing to give the airline their money. Finding the compensation terms and signing up requires navigating through to the small print.
It’s this kind of corporate behaviour that adds fuel to Labour’s misguided calls for state ownership of public utilities, such as the railways.
Weak regulators and political indifference among the Tories have also allowed the idea to take root. But nationalisation will never work because pressure on public finances will always lead to under-investment.
It has long been my view that the highly trained former RAF engineers and pilots in charge of air safety at the Civil Aviation Authority do a fine job in keeping passengers secure. But the CAA’s economic regulation of airlines is all but invisible.
The very least citizens could have expected after the May breakdown of systems at BA is a review by the regulator and some heavy fines for BA’s failure to fulfil the flying schedules promised.
As for Ryanair, Michael O’Leary and his cohorts should be forced to pay a heavy price for this shambles, cough up refunds without delay and be punished by the appropriate authorities for a catastrophic service breakdown.
Perhaps then they’ll remember that their customers are not merely there to be squeezed for every last penny.