EU261 and Ryanair re-routing

Donchik

Dear gurus,
I'm struggling with Ryanair customer service and an issue with re-routing.
My outbound flight was cancelled by Ryanair "cancelled due to commercial reasons"
The email also stated "You are entitled to be re-routed to your final destination, under comparable transport conditions"
Simple enough you would have expected, but as usual Ryanair have made this a nightmare.
Online with ryanair.com the only options were a day before or a day after using Ryanair flights. The flight times made both of these totally unacceptable options as they were scheduled to arrive at their destination at nearly midnight. To summarise:

• Day early, have to pay extra day of hotel, but not arrive at the hotel until the original day.
• Day after, lose a whole day at our hotel, and unable to recover costs.

Because of this, spent days on their chat service trying to get Ryanair to re-route me onto an alternative flight provided by Jet2. which departs within 15 minutes of original flight from the same airport.

Ryanair chat agents deliberately disconnected me on multiple occasions once they realised I was demanding a re-routing to a competitor airline.

Raising tickets of complaint simply led to automatic form letters directing me to their EU261 claim form. I repeatedly told them this was NOT a claim, but a re-routing request, but still got sent back to the form.

After multiple attempts finally managed to get a "Real" person at Ryanair to respond.

The response advised me in legalise to book the flight and claim as an expense. Specifically:

"If you incur additional expenses due to this cancellation, such as the costs of an alternative flight with another airline (which is available sooner than the alternative flight offered by Ryanair), please note that we can only reimburse expenses for which you have provided VAT receipts with information such as the date and time of purchase, as well as specific purchases and their prices.

Once you receive the confirmation of the alternative flight booking, please forward us the relevant receipts in response to this e-mail"

Armed with this, I proceeded to book the re-routed flights and replied with the flight details as an attachment.

Ryanair then responded thus:
"We would like to inform that under EU261/2004 Regulation, the passenger is entitled to reimbursement only in case he reached his destination. In order to process your claim, we kindly ask you to contact us as soon as you reach your destination - Madeira, by replying to this message."

To say I'm unhappy is an understatement, and do not see any reason for me to stand the cost of this expensive one-way flight whilst Ryanair sit on my refund until March '24

I've advised them that this is not acceptable and contradicts the previous emails which made no reference to this delay in refunding. If they persist with this, is a "Deadlock" and taking the matter to their ADR a viable option?

Many thanks for your time and knowledge of EU261's finer points.
Donchik

eskbanker

Donchik said:

Ryanair then responded thus:
"We would like to inform that under EU261/2004 Regulation, the passenger is entitled to reimbursement only in case he reached his destination. In order to process your claim, we kindly ask you to contact us as soon as you reach your destination - Madeira, by replying to this message."

I'm not aware of anything in EU261 that determines when reimbursement of alternative flight ticket costs should be made, in fact theoretically the airline is obliged to make those arrangements itself, so you could perhaps ask them for the specific clause on which they're relying?

Conversely, I'm not aware of anything that would oblige them to refund immediately either, and I don't see any actual commitment from Ryanair to this in the quotes you've shared, even though it's perhaps not an unreasonable interpretation from being asked to send receipts in once confirmed.

Donchik said:

If they persist with this, is a "Deadlock" and taking the matter to their ADR a viable option?

Perhaps viable, but pointless, as the full ADR process timescales would result in case conclusion after March, so continuing to press Ryanair for prompt reimbursement is probably more pragmatic....