Ryanair Cr*p Telephone Service

Sam_Bee

Obviously a bit late but...

Sam Bee's Top Travel Tip:

Forward all flight information / booking references / hotel info / confirmations / scan of your passport to an internet based e-mail account so you can access anytime abroad. Or in case your computer brakes and you have to fanny about on the phone to Ryanair for exactly 15 minutes.

vixarooni

Not being funny, but it is now the common norm to be on the phone for ages to big companies such as this. I wouldnt even for a nano second think that i could ring them up, get a person on the other end i could understand and be done and finished within 3 minutes. Its just inpossible.

And, it was yourself who blocked it in the first place! lord.

Youve only got to look at ryan airs website to tell you what they are like, i wouldnt use them at all. You get what you pay for as they say

dmg24

vixarooni wrote: »

Not being funny, but it is now the common norm to be on the phone for ages to big companies such as this. I wouldnt even for a nano second think that i could ring them up, get a person on the other end i could understand and be done and finished within 3 minutes. Its just inpossible.

And, it was yourself who blocked it in the first place! lord.

Youve only got to look at ryan airs website to tell you what they are like, i wouldnt use them at all. You get what you pay for as they say

Don't worry vixarooni, peterbaker actively sets out to find reasons to complain about Ryanair! x

peterbaker

dmg I do not actively set out to find reasons to complain about Ryanair. I am all for the quiet life actually, but when companies mess up my world unreasonably (and by unreasonable I use my own standard and not the standards condoned by no doubt younger or inexperienced consumers like vixarooni), or if I see them doing things which are potentially unsafe or illegal or both, then people are likely to hear about it.

I have said before that the silly bleating 'if you don't like a company's reputation you should use someone else' is a childish and destructive thing to level at your aggrieved fellow consumer. It is typical of many of the younger generations who sadly we have let down by failing to educate them broadly enough to set leading standards of their own by the time they arrive at MSE and dare to click the Submit button.

Ryanair is the biggest baddest airline in the UK and has been successful in effectively monopolising most of their routes. There are often no alternatives, and even if there were, it is not sufficient to just blank a supplier and hope others do the same in order to get improvements. Air travel is a huge part of modern day life and we all want it to be reasonably priced, undoubtedly safe, and run by people we can trust to be leading citizens. It's their choice, not ours. If they want to make us feel really good inside about using them, much like some of us did with BA for much of the period Lord King was in charge, then they have to change some things about their PR and customer service.

I accept that probably large numbers of UK consumers don't really care about so-called standards because they don't understand how to measure them let alone understand what I am on about, so I appreciate my comments might only ring true with some of the other consumers. I suggest however, that those others are the ones that might include the prospective future Ryanair customers that actually have the wherewithall to shell out more than the penny fares for their travel. Without them, Ryanair's model would struggle I think.

I know Ryanair are capable of creating that "warm inside" feel good factor ... I will even admit again to smiling at some of the quips Michael O'Leary makes on tv. I just wish he'd tweak it a bit and start mellowing Ryanair into a truly great business worthy of getting an honorary title in the New Years Honours list or something, instead of just a big rude upstart teenager of a business! And if MO'L reads that, then he probably won't stop laughing until next Christmas...

alared

Ryanair and Easyjet are strictly internet based companies and you cannot book flights over the phone.
The idea of this is pretty obvious,it costs them money to have people answer phone calls and that`s why they actively discourage people from phoning by making them pay through the nose for any calls.

You can and do get great bargain airfares BUT if you make an error or mistake then you pay in other ways for the cheap flight.

People should take careful note of their booking reference:
print it,write it down,save it on their PC,save the email on their PC

Dirt cheap flights have to be paid for somehow,phone calls being one of them,so it`s no good complaining when a mistake is made and you have to contact them
Incidentally how much is it a minute to phone Ryanair?

peterbaker

Hmm...Aly, I think we all know that Easyjet are something else, ... my personal taste would be any recent video of Michael telling it how he thinks it is ... chacun(e?) a son (or sa) goute and all that ... :eek:

vixarooni

peterbaker wrote: »

dmg I do not actively set out to find reasons to complain about Ryanair. I am all for the quiet life actually, but when companies mess up my world unreasonably (and by unreasonable I use my own standard and not the standards condoned by no doubt younger or inexperienced consumers like vixarooni), or if I see them doing things which are potentially unsafe or illegal or both, then people are likely to hear about it.

I have said before that the silly bleating 'if you don't like a company's reputation you should use someone else' is a childish and destructive thing to level at your aggrieved fellow consumer. It is typical of many of the younger generations who sadly we have let down by failing to educate them broadly enough to set leading standards of their own by the time they arrive at MSE and dare to click the Submit button.

Ryanair is the biggest baddest airline in the UK and has been successful in effectively monopolising most of their routes. There are often no alternatives, and even if there were, it is not sufficient to just blank a supplier and hope others do the same in order to get improvements. Air travel is a huge part of modern day life and we all want it to be reasonably priced, undoubtedly safe, and run by people we can trust to be leading citizens. It's their choice, not ours. If they want to make us feel really good inside about using them, much like some of us did with BA for much of the period Lord King was in charge, then they have to change some things about their PR and customer service.

I accept that probably large numbers of UK consumers don't really care about so-called standards because they don't understand how to measure them let alone understand what I am on about, so I appreciate my comments might only ring true with some of the other consumers. I suggest however, that those others are the ones that might include the prospective future Ryanair customers that actually have the wherewithall to shell out more than the penny fares for their travel. Without them, Ryanair's model would struggle I think.

I know Ryanair are capable of creating that "warm inside" feel good factor ... I will even admit again to smiling at some of the quips Michael O'Leary makes on tv. I just wish he'd tweak it a bit and start mellowing Ryanair into a truly great business worthy of getting an honorary title in the New Years Honours list or something, instead of just a big rude upstart teenager of a business! And if MO'L reads that, then he probably won't stop laughing until next Christmas...

Perhaps my views are young and inexperienced, i apologise for being only 21.

You said that Ryan Air had messed up your world but YOU were the one who blocked YOUR account then moaned about the time it took to get the info back again. Perhaps when you booked the flight you should have double and third checked all your numbers then you wouldnt be here in the first place?

You say i should think before hitting the submit button, but you have caused all this yourself then choose to moan about the company when it was your fault anyway? Yes 15 mins is a long time to wait on the phone, but in my short time on Earth i know that number is probably the estimated time you spend on the phone for every company there is!

Oh and i would love you to teach me leading standards of my own so when i hit the submit button i dont sound like a young person who knows nothing about nothing. I would love to hear your views.

peterbaker

vixarooni, wasn't having a pop at you personally. I apologise on behalf of my generation for letting down your generation in terms of the broader education that I think everyone should have received by the time they are 21 in 2007

But even with your SATS-driven, we all get straight As, every-college-is-a-university type experience you surely appreciate that to condone an average dire performance is hardly the way to buck up people's ideas and make life less wasteful of other people's time or other people's resources.

Putting the time to one side, just think how much wasted energy goes into powering the trillions of telephone systems that generally get answered after an average 15 minutes.

I fully accept I made a mistake by running out of my own resources for safe-keeping of my booking reference, but the only reason I was inclined to double-check it in the first place was because of the reduced confidence the airline created when I spotted them cancelling flights and making swingeing schedule changes some weeks ago without telling me. Ordinarily I would not have looked at the booking reference from the moment of booking right up to the moment of standing at the desk quoting it as I handed over my passport.

Businesses need customers. They interact with them to do business and in this case they provide something largely abstract called an airline service. Airline travel is still something more than just a bus service and as you may have noticed, the very act of using an airline service can raise a myriad of questions depending on how highly strung you as a traveller might be!

Questions like mine are normal. So normal in fact that the airline themselves have even made it specific option 2 in their automated telephone service ('if you require an additional copy of your emailed itinerary press 2' ).... So why did Ryanair wobble my confidence in the first place, why did their option 2 fail twice, and why did it then take an unreasonable (my word not yours) amount of fuss for me to sort it out today?

As it turns out, the booking reference and flight times as stored from the outset in my phone calendar were perfectly correct, and my confidence level in turning up at the correct time and expecting an airline service to transport me from A to B is once more restored, but in so doing today, the world has been unnecessarily globally-warmed just that teenzy bit more than I would have hoped.

Donnie

Personally, I always take a screenshot of internet confirmations and send them to my web based email account. It's convenient to have a dedicated folder.

budgetflyer

Here lies the answer Peter. Learn from your mistakes and move forward.
Webmail, as suggested first by Sam Bee would have saved you all this hassle.
I use Yahoo.co.uk. It has unlimited storage and you can set up folders ie "Ryanair bookings".
I stopped using PC based email programmes after losing an important booking ref a few years ago.

Its all very well ranting about Ryanair, you know the score. Deviate from simple and basic and you are getting hammered.

Todays lesson will benefit you many times over