Ray O’Connor from Galway gave his granddaughter a Ryanair voucher worth €200 as an 18th birthday gift some years ago, but instead of the present helping her to explore the world – or at least the parts of the world serviced by the airline – it has seen her, her mother and her grandad travelling down many frustrating and fruitless culs de sac.
“She has repeatedly tried to use the voucher, but for one reason or another all attempts failed,” Ray writes. “She, her mother, Natasha, and I have spent hours between ‘bots’, human beings (text support), and have never managed to actually speak to a human being.”
He says they have been given multiple reasons why the voucher does not work, including that “the names on the passport and the voucher don’t match – they do. They tell us the voucher is out of date – it’s not – the voucher clearly states the expiry date is September 30th, 2027.”
He says the family have also been asked for the last four digits of the credit/debit card used but, with the passage of time, “that’s not possible – I think it may have been the Ulster Bank – which was my lifetime bank until they pulled up sticks and left. I have since been with the PTSB, but I cannot find [a record of] my debit card being used, so I’m guessing it was Ulster Bank.”
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He says Pricewatch is his “last port of call. Essentially I want a replacement voucher, valid for a year will do fine, or whatever you can do to help me get some satisfaction from Ryanair.”
Ray goes on to say, “The odd thing is that I am one of their staunchest supporters – I have nothing but praise for them (until now!) They got me out of a bit of a jam one year when we were in the Canaries – there was a problem at home – they changed our flights – no problem, no charge. While [we were] there, the problem was resolved at home, and they changed our flights back to the original bookings – once again, no hassle, and no charge.”
He says more recently he booked a holiday for his wife and her sister and “got the name wrong – once again, no problem, no charge, so once again off I went, a happy customer. I wish the instructions on how to redeem the voucher were as simple as the voucher says.”
We got in touch with the airline to see if it would do anything to help our Galway reader.
A spokeswoman said they had “checked this customer’s voucher, and it is valid and ready for use”.
She agreed that the name on the voucher matches the passport and said “there shouldn’t be any problem”.
She said the customer service team would be in contact with Ray directly “to try to ascertain what the problem is, or to make the booking on their behalf”.
She was as good as her word and hours later we heard back from a delighted Ray.
He said he had just been called by a “lovely” Ryanair staff member “telling me that she is now in charge of my problem and by this time tomorrow she will have the value of the voucher refunded to my card (or somebody’s card – probably my granddaughter – but that’s OK too!)”.
We then heard from Ryanair again. “It appeared [Ray’s granddaughter] had an older voucher dating from September 2022. In some cases, the apostrophe in these older vouchers caused a validation issue which has been fixed in more recent voucher issues.”
