Flying is a complicated business with many variables, from weather and volcanoes to engines and human beings able to derail the most carefully laid plans in an instant. But how an airline manages things when they go wrong is key and two readers have found their dealings with Aer Lingus after their flights were cancelled to be endlessly frustrating.
A reader called Sofie had a plan to travel to London in early September but ended up in a web of confusion and time changes as a result of Aer Lingus.
Her flight from Cork to London Heathrow on September 3rd was cancelled at short notice. “After the cancellation, Aer Lingus’s rebooking system offered me the 7:10am flight the following morning at £0.00, but the system repeatedly failed when I tried to confirm it,” she writes.
She has “timestamped screenshots showing repeated attempts over the course of the evening, including the flight being available at £0.00 and the Aer Lingus system returning booking errors”.
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Eventually, Aer Lingus rebooked Sofie on to a flight the following day leaving Cork just after 4pm. “This was far too late as I needed to be back in London for work that morning. With the early flight showing limited availability and the rebooking system continuing to fail, I booked the 07:10 Aer Lingus flight myself and paid €174.12.”
She was subsequently refunded €66.43 for the cancelled flight and was paid £220 (€260) in EC261 compensation.
“However, they are refusing to reimburse the additional cost of the replacement flight, arguing that I purchased it independently and should have contacted customer service instead,” she says.
“This is the part I find particularly frustrating. I did not simply decide to make my own arrangements. I was repeatedly trying to accept the exact Aer Lingus flight they were offering me at no additional cost, but their own system would not allow me to complete the booking. Had their rebooking system worked, I would not have incurred the €174.12 cost at all. I remain approximately €110 out of pocket.”
She contacted us having had “several exchanges with Aer Lingus, but they continue to repeat that because an alternative 16:10 flight had been allocated and because customer service was available, they will not reimburse me”.
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We have one more story from a reader who is also in dispute with Aer Lingus over a cancelled flight.
Before sharing his “ordeal” with us, David says he is really “just looking to see if my experience chimes with anyone else you’ve come across. The whole process has been trying, to say the least.”
David and his wife were due to fly Dublin-London Heathrow at 5.30pm on Friday, May 29th. They arrived at the airport, checked in their bags in and after passing through security got an email, at 4.15pm, informing them the flight was cancelled “due to operational reasons”.
Around 30 minutes later he received another email, stating that the itinerary had changed and he and his wife had been automatically booked on a 7.30am flight the next morning to Manchester – a fine city for sure, but certainly not London.
“We would then have to wait in Manchester for a 4.40pm flight to LHR, arriving at 5.50pm on the Saturday evening,” David says. “The Aer Lingus staff member at the departure gate could offer no further information, other than to direct us back out to departures to queue at the service desk.”
David points out that there were probably 100 people in that queue “many of whom I suspect were arranging accommodation for the night as there were no flights available that evening. We live in Dublin, so instead I called the customer helpline and spoke to an Aer Lingus agent. In fairness to him, he tried to get us on a direct Aer Lingus flight to LHR on the Saturday, but told me no seats were available.”
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David says he explained that he was not keen to “spend the whole of Saturday sitting in Manchester airport. The best he could do was a direct flight on the Sunday, which wasn’t much use to us either. My wife was checking Skyscanner on her phone at the time and there seemed to be some seats on Ryanair flights to London on the Saturday. He explained he couldn’t book us on one of those flights, but he advised me that if I went ahead and booked the flight, I could submit the cost of the flight as an expense through the online portal, and Aer Lingus would cover the cost of those flights.”
When David got home from the airport on the Friday evening he too went on to Skyscanner and “actually found two seats on an Aer Lingus flight direct to LHR for the Saturday morning, arriving into LHR at 11.15am”.
He says they went through a third-party vendor called Vayama “which probably explains why the Aer Lingus agent on the phone couldn’t access them. They weren’t cheap (€850), but I took a chance and booked them based on the conversation I’d just had with the Aer Lingus agent.”
“After returning to Dublin the following week I submitted both the compensation claim and the expenses claim as instructed. You can probably guess what happened next. Aer Lingus paid the compensation for the cancelled flights (€250 per person, €500 in total) promptly. They did also reimburse the €52 for return bus tickets to and from the airport, but refused to pay for the rebooked flights.
“They maintained they had provided us with acceptable alternative flights (the Manchester layover option). There then followed a series of back and forth emails. I had just gotten a new phone which had a recording of their agent advising us to book the flights ourselves. I sent them a copy of the audio recording, but they refused to back down and told me they felt they had discharged their obligations to me.”
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He says that while the airline “acknowledge that you considered this itinerary unsuitable and chose instead to purchase alternative flights directly, Regulation (EC) 261/2004 does not require reimbursement of independently purchased flights where the airline has already provided an alternative rerouting option. Having reviewed the circumstances of your journey, we remain satisfied that rerouting was provided following the cancellation.”
David accepts that they did provide alternative flights, but says EU laws state that it is required to provide rerouting “under comparable transport conditions, to their final destination at the earliest opportunity”.
“I’ve made a complaint to the Irish Aviation Authority and also lodged a case against them in the Small Claims Court. Am I wasting my time?”
There is no need for the Small Claims court any more.
When we highlighted both of these stories the airline came back to say it “has reviewed the cases of the customers who purchased alternative flights. We have now issued refunds in both cases.”
