Ryanair passengers whose flights are cancelledover the next two weeks are to get compensation. the airline wil not be claiming espectional circumstances for their annual leave fiasco. ‘This is OUR mess-up,” CEO Michael O’Leary told a press conference in Swords.
Key points from the press conference were:
- This was a mess up by the airline
- Michael O’Leary would call for heads to roll if this was done by anyone else, but he will not leave because of this
- The interlining talks with Norwegian have ended
- Norwegian will be gone in a year
- Ryanair won’t quibble with compensation
- Ryanair doesn’t have a pilot shortage
- Pilots are coming to Ryanair from Norwegian
He said: “Fifty flights a day will be cancelled for the next six weeks because punctuality has fallen to around 70pc. Over the weekend and today, we have finalised a list of cancellations. We are trying to cancel flights on busy routes where we can offer passengers a choice of alternatives. We will be issuing emails to all customers this evening as well as updates on social media. This is a large number of flight cancellations, but amounts to less than 2pc of our flying programme. The other 98pc of flights and customers will not be affected.”
“The airline is trying to allocate, from a large amount of annual leave to Ryanair staff, principally pilots. We are not short of pilots. What we have messed up is the allocation of holidays. We don’t have enough stand-by coverage to cover the inevitable disruptions that happen – air traffic control disruption and weather. We don’t have enough pilots in September and October to allocate the leave. As we take disruptions – eg thunder storms this weekend in Barcelona – and as crew and aircraft get stuck, there are no back-up crews available. We need to take out about 50 flights a day over the next six weeks while we have these crewing issues. This decision minimises delays and cancellations because of crew leave issues.”
