Ryanair dispute

bagand96

The Ryanair agent said that they wouldn't offer a free flight move or refund. 

Based on the archive page linked above this may or may not have been correct for your booking.  The flight could always have been moved either subject to fees or not. 

I'm guessing you didn't try and move the flights via Manage Booking on ryanair.com

englishrob

bagand96 said:

The Ryanair agent said that they wouldn't offer a free flight move or refund. 

Based on the archive page linked above this may or may not have been correct for your booking.  The flight could always have been moved either subject to fees or not. 

I'm guessing you didn't try and move the flights via Manage Booking on ryanair.com

I didn't try to move the flights because as you can see in her statements above, "there are no other solutions" and apart from travelling on the flight booked, "no other solution can be made regarding to those flights for now"
You would have thought that a customer service agent would have said that I could have change the flights for a fee if that was available, instead of "use it or lose it"

Thrugelmir

englishrob said:

but Ryanair are just not helping in any way, and of course they were using the excuse of operating the flight outbound to bring people back.

People were still flying outbound. Many people commute/travel to see family. Far from being a one way street. 

bagand96

I do sympathise with you OP...

In addition to what eskbanker said, the web archives of Ryanair's homepage on 26th July - Official Ryanair website | Cheap flights in Europe | Ryanair (archive.org) - show a scrolling red banner with "Covid 19 - Latest updates and FAQ's"

The Covid-19 Updates page from 28th July - Covid 19 Updates (archive.org) - has FAQs at the bottom, including the following:

Can I postpone my flight, if I don’t want to fly due to current situation?

From 10 June, customers who book to travel in July & August will be able to move their flights with zero change fee to travel until the 31 Dec 2020. This flight date change will only apply to the route customers have already booked and trips must be completed before the 2020 year end.

This is further backed up by the No Change Fee page from 14th July - No change fee (archive.org) - which also states boookings after 10th June for travel in July & August were able to change dates for free upto December 31st 2020.

But I'm not sure what else to suggest.  Other than to get in touch with Ryanair again and complain that you feel misled by their agents advice.  I expect Ryanair will say the agent was responding in respect to your conversation about them cancelling the flight or providing a refund., They will also likely state that plenty of information was on their website, and you could have moved the dates via My Booking.

You won't get a refund as you were never entitled to one, so the best you could ask for would be travel credit, but to be honest I think your chances are slim. They're an Irish company and unfortunately there's no longer a simple route to start court proceedings against them (and even if there was there's no guarantee you'd win).