An air passengers' report highlighting the increasing problem of lost luggage has been rejected by Ryanair boss Mr Michael O'Leary.
He said the Air Transport Users Council (AUC) report for 2001-02 was "typical of what you comes from the AUC - there is very little fact in it - although Ryanair does pretty well in the report.
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"The figures are incorrect - we are knocking up approximately the same number of complaints per passenger as British Airways, who carry about twice the number of passengers as Ryanair," he told BBC Radio 4.
"Our number of complaints has fallen in the last year and the number of complaints in total to the AUC about all airlines has fallen by about 20 per cent in the last year".
Overall, the AUC received 1,163 written complaints in 2001-02 (the 12 months ending March 2002) compared with 1,417 in 2000-01. Complaints against Ryanair fell from 138 in 2000-01 to 77 in 2001-02.
But the AUC 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".
Ryanair said: "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".
PA