Ryanair sold our return tickets!

Rokster

I'd booked return flights from Stansted to Baden-Baden. We were unable to check-in online due to no signal and no WiFi in our AirBnb so arrived at the airport at around 6am to check-in, almost two hours before the departure time of 7:45am.

We had briefly missed online check-in which closed at two hours before the flight so went to the airport check-in only to be told that our seats had been reallocated due to not checking in online. We argued the case but they were adamant. They started to give out boarding passes, giving one to my wife and one to my daughter, saying that we could wait to see if any seats were available after all other passengers had boarded. They then seemed to change their minds and said we would have to pay 55 Euros each for the privilege of seeing whether any seats were left after everyone else had boarded. I handed over my debit card and paid the 55 Euros they asked and all three of us went through passport control and to boarding.

We were in boarding over an hour before departure and waited there for over two hours due to the plane being delayed. We had been told to decide what priority we wanted to board the plane in case there were seats available but not enough for all three so we decided on the order of my daughter, my wife and then me.

At the end of boarding there were two seats available so we obviously expected these to go to my daughter and then to my wife but Ryanair told us that there were seats for my daughter and myself. They didn't care this was against the priority order we had asked them for. I couldn't leave my wife in Germany, especially as her phone wasn't working but they insisted that they couldn't swap my wife and myself on the boarding. This resulted in my daughter going through to stand at the top of the stairs beside the plane, waiting to see who would be accompanying her only to find it would be nobody.

My wife and I went back through security and to the Ryanair desk. It seems the problem was that they had only charged us for one boarding pass. They had allocated free ones to my daughter and wife thinking, I believe, that our previous flight to Stansted had been cancelled. They had then realised what we had been very clear about, that we wanted to check-in on the plane we had paid for but the lady taking payment had seen my wife and daughter already had boarding passes so had only charged us for one. Somehow this transpired to them not allowing my wife to board the plane but for some reason allowing my daughter and I to do so.

My wife and I were then charged 100 Euros each to catch the plane at 10:30pm that evening.

We had to pay for an AirBnb for the day for my daughter as we needed her to pick us up from the airport over 12 hours later when we would finally arrive. We also ended up out of pocket for taxis from and back to the airport at around 50 euros each way (as we weren't about to stay in the airport for over 12 hours), food, drink, etc in addition to my daughter losing a day's pay from work as she was unable to travel back from London without us.

On top of this is the obvious stress and distress caused to the whole family. We ended up driving the 4 hour journey home at midnight, arriving around 4am in the morning rather then the leisurely drive home at 10am that we had planned. My wife had to go to work the next day absolutely exhausted.

We assumed we would simply have to explain this in a complaint and would be appropriately reimbursed but Ryanair have come back with various reasons for not doing so. They have blamed us in various different ways - the fact we hadn't checked-in online, that we were late for check-in that we were late for boarding and so on despite the fact we have repeatedly been very clear that we were at check-in almost two hours before the flight and at boarding over an hour before the originally scheduled departure.

Emails to the complaints department have gone back and forth around six or seven times yet they still don't seem to have read our actual complaint properly and don't seem to be responding any more having advised us of the ombudsman procedure. They even advised me that the three of us would have to raise separate complaints! We have linked them to the information from their own site saying you can check-in at the airport up to forty minutes before the flight (these state - If you do not check in online up to 2 hours before your scheduled departure time, you may check in at the airport up to 40 minutes before departure, but you will be charged an airport check-in fee. See our Table of Fees. We urge all passengers to check in online before arriving at the airport so these fees can be avoided). We have confirmed with our bank that payment for the 55 Euros for boarding was made over 70 minutes before the departure time.

This has turned a simple, short weekend at a German Christmas market from a treat for the family to an incredibly stressful nightmare.

We don't have receipts for a lot of the expenditures as taxi drivers don't take Mastercard over there and there are no Ubers so we tended to use cash for most things.

Is this normal behaviour for Ryanair customer services? Do I have any alternative other than to go through the Ombudsman which, I assume, will take many months and be an equally stressful experience? I really am at a loss as to how they can possibly be trying to transfer the blame to us rather than accepting they messed up spectacularly. Am I also correct that they should pay for out of pocket expenses and for stress and distress caused by them? 

eskbanker

Your rights here are governed by the denied boarding provisions of the UK 261 regulations which boil down to:

1. Fixed tariff compensation of £220pp (for a flight of this length)
2. A refund of your original ticket cost or reimbursement of a replacement flight ticket (your choice, so pick the more valuable of these!)
3. "meals and refreshments in a reasonable relation to the waiting time" plus, if delayed overnight, hotel accommodation and transportation to/from it.

elsien

You might struggle to get reimbursement for both of you when one of you could have gone? 

heatherw_01

Not sure no signal for WIFI would be enough to get compensation?

You could have gotten it from many places.

Voyager2002

This underlines the importance of checking in before the cut-off time.

silvercar

Voyager2002 said:

This underlines the importance of checking in before the cut-off time.

Check in closes 40 minutes before take off, for those who choose (or are forced) to check in in person.

It is well known that all airlines oversell tickets in the knowledge that not everyone turns up for their flight. When the algorithm goes wrong they have to pay compensation, it's factored into their business model. They are relatively free to choose who loses their seat.

It's almost a shame your daughter wasn't 10 years old and standing at the top of the stairs, that would have caused a quandary for the staff. Certainly pursue compensation for being denied boarding, as is your right. 

Rokster

(Removed by Forum Team)

The point being that their own website says you can check in from the airport. Thanks for the useful response.

Rokster

(Removed by Forum Team)

Ryanair state that you can check-in at the airport up to forty minutes before a flight and we had no reason to doubt that. That's what this post is about. The reason why we were checking in at the airport is irrelevant. For some reason you chose to focus on the fist paragraph and attempt to make a stressful situation just a little bit worse (and continue to do so).

Thank you to @eskbanker and @silvercar for their responses - we have now raised a complaint for compensation to the Ombudsman.