The Boss of Ryanair, Michael O'Leary has been forced to apologise for the horrendous inconvenience caused by what they are now calling 'a pilot rota blunder' for leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers in limbo over the cancellation of flights.
The so-called low-cost budget airline has had to concede that it had "messed up" in the planning of pilot holidays, but still, blames air traffic control strikes and weather disruptions for an increase in delays for the first part of September.
The airline had faced calls from consumer watchdogs to publish a list of the 40 -50 flights it was planning to cancel every day for the next six weeks. The airline is facing a compensation bill of potentially £18m as a result of the problems. In a bid to ward off an Irish Government investigation into the airlines' behaviour, it will publish a list of flights to be cancelled, to ease passenger concern.
Mr O'Leary attended a hastily called press conference to try to appease angry passengers, saying that the flights to be scrapped would mainly be on routes which had multiple daily services. However, this has not been the case so far, with most cancellations being routes with just one daily flight from an individual airport.
Mr O'Leary told the media at the press conference that the airline had taken time to identify those services and it was making it a priority to communicating with passengers. However the airline won't be calling affected passengers, it will continue to send email notifications and/or SMS text messages, so the promise that it's making it a priority seems to ring hollow.
The airline needs to keep a 90+% punctuality level for its shareholder's reports for the end of the year and for the first part of September the airline's on-time departure level dropped to around 80%. The airline is also under the spotlight in Europe with a European Commission spokesperson telling a press conference in Brussels: "Airlines operating in the EU need to respect the European rules. Passengers whose flights are cancelled have a comprehensive set of rights. We have to check if all this is respected by Ryanair. For instance, you are entitled to reimbursement if you are not warned two weeks in advance."
❗This article was written for this site by a member of our team 🙋, please do share it with your friends via social media. You are also welcome to post it or republish elsewhere on the 🌎web on the condition that you credit the author and link back to our site. Thank you.
♻ We care about the environment, please think twice before you hit ‘print’
