Most of my readers will know of and about Ryanair, the Irish low-cost, no-frills airline which treats its passengers like something you stand on in the street.
Now, I have to say at this juncture that I have only flown Ryanair once, several years ago, when wise to their pathetic attempt to con passengers by stating that Prestwick was in fact, Glasgow Prestwick (it’s about 30 miles away in another county!), I took their flight because I actually wanted to go to Prestwick. The flight was ok as I recall. Not late, and as it was only a flight of about 1 hour, there were no real problems. So I have no real gripe, personally, about Ryanair, or Ruinair, as one guy calls it.
However, if Ryanair was a normal business, the amount of bad publicity it gets, would drive the company to the wall within weeks. I actually think that Michael O’Leary, it’s CEO, is probably the rudest head of a major company I’ve ever seen or heard. The guy is a complete lunatic when it comes to ‘the customer experience’, obviously instructing his staff to be as rude as possible to complaining customers, and to rip them off with every imaginable charge they can justify.
So, if I’ve not had any really bad experiences with Ruinair (don’t worry, I’m not biased, I call Easyjet – Sleazyjet), why am I devoting blog space to them? Well – it appears that a fellow blogger, an IT guy called Jason Roe, spotted a bug in Ruinair’s web site and put it in his blog posting. Note – he did not send anything to Ruinair, but obviously, one of the airline’s staff, who probably should have been dealing with customer (dis)service, was trawling the internet and came across it and wrote back to Mr Roe as follows (bad grammar and mistakes faithfully reprinted) :
"You’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is! you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it!"
"If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things.
Now, all companies have ‘rogue’ employees who feel the need to converse with their paying public in the manner above but when a travel magazine picked up the story and asked Ruinair for an official comment, they got the following:
"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel”.
Great, isn’t it. Were they having a bad day? Not one bit of it. Here are some other nice diplomatic statements from O’Leary, the CEO.
“No, we shouldn’t give you a bloody cup of coffee. We only charge €19 for the ticket.” - after being asked why, after a nine hour delay, the airline was charging for in-flight drinks.
“I’m always actually very pleasant, but don’t believe in trotting out all that PC claptrap just not to upset a couple of fucking environmental lunatics. They are just loons.” – when asked if he’d ever considered being pleasant.
"I have always found it hard to feel sympathy with owners of holiday home owners. We are working hard to make travel affordable for everyone, not just those with homes in Tuscany and Chiantishire” – responding to comments about him scrapping popular holiday routes.
So why do people flock to his airline? Is it to see if it’s really that bad? Is it masochists, lining up to be abused by Ruinair’s staff? After all, they’ve charged for wheelchairs. They ejected 8 blind people from a flight because ‘they were over their quota of disabled people’. They turfed off a Jamaican Steel band because they looked like a terrorist group.
So why do people flock to his airline? Is it to see if it’s really that bad? Is it masochists, lining up to be abused by Ruinair’s staff? After all, they’ve charged for wheelchairs. They ejected 8 blind people from a flight because ‘they were over their quota of disabled people’. They turfed off a Jamaican Steel band because they looked like a terrorist group.
Nope – people only fly Ruinair because it is probably the only airline flying the route and they’ve no choice.
See following link about various Ruinair escapades.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/news/article5795531.ece
Stop Press - Ryanair have announced that they are considering levying a charge for using the loos on board their planes.
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