A consumer watchdog for the airline industry has stopped accepting complaints against budget carrier Ryanair because the company refuses to co-operate with it.
Britain's Air Transport Users Council (AUC) has revealed it is actively discouraging complaints from disgruntled passengers of Ryanair, which has said it will not respond to correspondence.
Unveiling its annual report, the council partially attributed a 50 percent fall-off in complaints against Ryanair to its policy of not investigating grievances against the airline. Ryanair was the subject of the third highest number of complaints to the council last year.
British Airways, with 117 complaints against it in 2001-02, topped the list, followed by Air France (110 complaints), Ryanair (77) and KLM and its subsidiaries (53).
A council spokesman said: "Complaints about Ryanair appear to have fallen off considerably since the previous year. Part of the explanation is because Ryanair has told us that it will not respond to correspondence from the AUC.
"We therefore do not encourage callers to our telephone advice line to send us copies of their correspondence with Ryanair, even if the complaint is of the type we would normally take up with an airline on the complainant's behalf."
Last night a Ryanair spokeswoman accused the council of selling passengers short by not highlighting "anti-competitive practices in the airline industry".
She said: "Ryanair won't enter into correspondence because the AUC continues to duck out of the real serious issues affecting consumers." Dismissing suggestions that Ryanair did not take grievances seriously, she said it had received fewer than 100 complaints last year, when passengers numbers had grown by 38 per cent.
"Of course we make mistakes and of course our service suffers from occasional faults, but we do our utmost to remedy any such faults.
"We also have an internal customer policy of responding to all passenger complaints within seven days of receipt."
Ryanair was the only carrier to publicly support the EU's call for publication of comparative monthly tables for airline on-time performance, customer complaints and lost baggage figures, she said.
The users council received 1,163 written complaints in 2001-02 compared with 1,417 in 2000-01.
Mishandled baggage accounted for 19 per cent, with ticketing (15 per cent) and delays (9 per cent) the next highest categories
The council said the number of lost luggage complaints remained unacceptably high.
A spokesman said: "Despite repeated assertions to the contrary from the airline industry, we see little evidence that there is any real concern about the impact on passengers of damaged, delayed or lost luggage."
He added: "Some passengers saw their grievances against airlines in a different perspective following the [September 11th\] attacks."
Despite posting record profits this year, Ryanair continues to be dogged by controversy.
In June the airline aroused the wrath of anti-Nazi campaigners by unveiling a service to the Austrian town governed by right-wing politician Mr Jörg Haider.
Earlier that month, Ryanair lost a High Court case against its millionth passenger, who sued when the company attempted to restrict her prize of free flights for life.