The European Commission has stepped into the Ryanair cancelled flights row and urges the company to respect passengers’ rights.
Ryanair has been inundated with negative and angry comment after it decided to cancel 2,000 flights up to the end of October, blaming variously the need to get its late arrivals figure down and on staff holidays, leaving the company with an insufficient number of pilots to run the company's services.
The European Commission, on Monday, September 18th, urged Ryanair to "fully respect" the rights of passengers, with Violetta Bulc, the Commissioner for Transport, adding that "Thanks to the European Union, all passengers whose flights were cancelled have a set of rights under European law."
These are the rules that Ryanair is adept as wriggling out of and include an entitlement to reimbursement, re-routing or a return flight, as well as the right to assistance and in certain circumstances the right to compensation," said Bulc.
"We are in contact with Ryanair and we expect them to fully respect these rights," said the European Commissioner, aware, as its the airline, that customers have to apply for compensation: the airline will not be offering it.
The Ryanair website notice advising Portuguese passengers does not refer to the right to compensation for cancellations and shows only two solutions: request a refund, processed in seven working days, or change the canceled flight free of charge, but subject to availability.
In a brief statement issued last Friday, the company said it would cancel 40 to 50 flights a day until the end of October, around 2,000 flights in total.
Embattled marketing director Kenny Jacobs said Ryanair was trying to organise its pilots' holidays and is working to "get back to normal", promising to send information to customers and publish news on the company's website. Michael O’Leary said that, “This is a mess of our own making,” and that Ryanair “are not short of pilots... but messed up allocation of annual leave.”
Ryanair stressed that cancellations would only affect 2% of their flights and that the goal is to "re-establish punctuality", which declined in the first two weeks of September to below 80%.
Trying, unsuccessfully to play down the ‘cancellation of flights’ policy which could affect over 9,000 passengers a day, O’Leary said, “It is clearly a mess but in context of an operational where we operate more than 2,500 flights a day it is reasonably small" - little comfort for those whose travel plans have been affected.
Portugal’s consumer association Deco informed Ryanair passengers of their right to receive compensation of up to €400 per canceled trip, in addition to reimbursement for meals and accommodation, and has called for the intervention of Portugal's aviation regulator.
Paulo Fonseca, a lawyer for Deco, accuses the carrier of hiding passengers' rights, such as the right to compensation.
"Passengers can either request reimbursement of the ticket, or go on an offered flight as soon as possible, but they always have the right to assistance (meals, drinks, telephone calls, accommodation) and compensation," said the lawyer, noting that the rules are applied to all companies flying in European Community airspace with exemptions only allowable if there is a hurricane of an act of terrorism.
"... the need for staff rest and the readjustment of delays are justifications from the company that are of no relevance to the consumer in terms of the compensation to which they are entitled," said Fonseca.
The lawyer also notes the recent Ryanair advertising campaign, launched a week ago in Portugal, which was offering 200 destinations at €14.99.
Deco also wants to know what Portugal’s aviation regulator, the National Civil Aviation Authority, is doing in the face of Ryanair’s "non-compliance with EU regulations."
It is not as if Ryanair is short of money. Between April and June this year the company made profits of €397 million, 55% up on the same period as last year.
The real reason:
At the root of Europe’s worst-ever case of staff shortage are two factors: annual holidays and Flight Time Limitations (FTLs), writes the Independent.
Short-haul aviation in Europe has very heavily pronounced peaks and troughs. Demand between Easter and the beginning of September is much stronger than the rest of the year – and this is also when airlines such as Ryanair make the vast majority of their profits.
Accordingly, airlines encourage pilots to take the bulk of their leave in a single, month-long block between September and March. The remainder comprises “ad hoc” days which can be taken as and when the schedule – and the crew manager – permits.
The Independent news service has seen a letter sent to pilots last Wednesday by Ryanair’s chief operations officer, Michael Hickey. He indicates that the airline has a “healthy overall crewing ratio,” and indeed says that there was actually a surplus of pilots in the peak months of July and August.
The airline must now be wishing it had sent some of them away on holiday. Instead, Mr Hickey is asking pilots to sell back their annual leave. But this has two problems: it may not be legally possible for some of them to work any longer; and there is anger among pilots at the way Ryanair has chosen to implement the change, with far less time off in summer.
A combination of the pilots’ understandable wish to use their holiday rather than lose it; the unbreakable rules on Flight Time Limitations; and an ambitious schedule mean that all the holidays are now bunched into the next six weeks, and Ryanair simply does not have enough staff to operate all the planned 2,200 flights a day.
Pilots move to rival airlines
There have been claims that Ryanair has been haemorrhaging pilots to rival airlines. Norwegian Air, which is building a new hub in Ryanair’s home airport of Dublin, said, “We can confirm that 140 pilots have joined Norwegian Air from Ryanair this year. Pilot recruitment is also under way for more pilots for our new Dublin base opening later this year.”
O’Leary disputed Norwegian’s figures - but admitted that Ryanair has begun offering its pilots at Captain level a €10,000 “signing-on bonus” to join.
Compensation
Financial compensation depends on the flight length and the reason for the cancellation. It ranges from €250 (short-haul, less than 1,500km) to €600 (long-haul, over 3,500km).
1) If you receive less than seven days notice of cancellation and choose to be re-routed as soon as possible, you will NOT be entitled to compensation - provided your new flights depart within one hour of the original departure and land within two hours of the original arrival.
2) If you receive between seven days and two weeks notice of cancellation, provided you choose to be re-routed and are facilitated with a new flight that departs no more than two hours before the original departure time and arrives no more than four hours after the original arrival time, you are NOT entitled to compensation.
3) If you receive notification of two weeks or more, you will NOT be entitled to compensation - provided, of course, that the airline offers full re-routing or refund options.
