Ryanair flight cancellation leaves couple with €550 bill

Regular flyers with Ryanair have been left scrambling following the latest raft of flight cancellations by the airline. One couple who travel to Nice on a regular basis had their flight cancelled at short notice and had to pay €550 for flights back to Dublin.

The airline on Thursday released additional details of flight cancellations: there will be a further 11 return flight cancellations per week from Dublin. However, no Irish regional airports are affected. From London Stansted, an extra 58 return flights per week have been cancelled.

A total of 28 flights per week have been cancelled from Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Glasgow Prestwick. The list of cancellations can be seen here. The cancellations are all at airports where there are two or more daily Ryanair flights to the destinations and are part of the 400,000 flights announced on Wednesday.

Amanda Kealy Baker and husband Sean are regular commuters to Nice with Ryanair. The couple book flights well in advance – they have 18 flights booked with the airline up to August 2018.

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Their flight last week to Dublin was cancelled with two days' notice. "We spent seven hours trying to contact Ryanair and had to give up in the end as we really needed to get back to Dublin. I panicked and just bought two more flights with Ryanair, for which we were then gouged €275 each," she told The Irish Times.

They have since claimed a refund for the unused flights, and each received a voucher for €80.

“I very much doubt if I will use the two vouchers to book another flight with them. I just won’t take the risk,” said Ms Baker.

Regular Ryanair flyers Arianna McDevitt and her husband face being unable to fly to Northern Ireland from London, where they are living. Ryanair recently cancelled Liverpool and Stansted to Derry and has now added Gatwick to Belfast to the list.

“We were due to fly out on December 30th to spend New Year’s Eve with our families. We only booked the flights on September 16th. We initially found out about the cancellations from media reports yesterday.

“Ryanair did not contact me until 2pm yesterday. Until that time I saw they were still telling people on social media that their flights would only have been cancelled if they had received an email – which I know was not true!” she said.

“There are essentially no Ryanair flights to Northern Ireland. Under civil aviation authority rules they should rebook us with another airline but I have been trying to contact them by phone and by live chat.” She claimed the live help desk chat system was not working and was unsuccessful in contacting the airline by phone.

“I have checked the Easyjet website for alternative flights on the same days we were due to travel and these are now up nearly five times the amount we initially paid with Ryanair. We are scared to go ahead and rebook with another airline in case Ryanair don’t refund us the original flight cost.”

Opera singer Elaine McDaid from Derry travels regularly from Dublin to Gatwick to work in London. She contacted us today from Dublin Airport where she was waiting for a flight. She said “I have no flights cancelled yet and am flying at least 14 times through September and October.

“I am perfectly happy with Ryanair as the flights are cheaper than a train fare to Galway, but the uncertainty is challenging. There are still delays, my flight today was due to take off at 11.05 and is only boarding now at 11.25”, she said.

The Commission for Aviation Regulation is receiving up to 300 complaints a week from disrupted Irish Ryanair passengers in the wake of thousands of flight cancellations announced in September.

Ryanair has cancelled 462 flights from Dublin from November 1st to March 24th, which means up to 87,000 people will not be flying. In the first round of cancellations 312,000 passengers were disrupted. In the second round of suspended flights, 400,000 passengers were disrupted.