Flight delay overnight and complete lack of compensation

abc_def

I tried to claim for a 11 hour overnight flight delay with Ryanair in which they were hesitant to offer accommodation overnight etc, but my claim was denied, citing the disruption was due to 'air traffic control restrictions'. While this may have been the case by the end, as my flight was at 22:55 and we were almost about to set off at 01:30 ish the next morning, there were a lot of factors that played into this.

Firstly, the flight was delayed off the bat. I know this can be due to air traffic control, but when we finally boarded at around midnight, they had no one to fuel the plane (as it was so late everyone had gone home). They finally got someone to refuel the plane (which takes half an hour) and as we were about to go, they said there was something wrong with something else and they needed an engineer on board (but suggested we would still depart when this issue was fixed). When we got off the plane, the customer service at the airport was actually quite unhelpful and told us that no we actually wouldn't be flying out that night/early morning,, and kind of tried to wash their hands of us. They said we could go to the customer service deck past security and sort out accommodation over night, but there was 'no guarantee we'd be let back through security with our boarding passes as they had already been scanned' which is kind of crazy as I assume this happens semi frequently so they know what to do.

By this point it was 3am and I think we had all given up, so all of us ended up sleeping in the airport as our rebooked flight was also for 9am the next morning. Overall, they were really unhelpful, and even with me claiming back my breakfast the next morning which I was allowed to claim for, I have heard nothing. I was only away for a weekend so I lost 1/4 of my time away, a night in my hotel that isn't going to be refunded and I had to sleep in a busy, loud airport. 

Is there anything I can do here? I got a generic 'sorry' email with a chance to win a 100 euro Ryanair gift card, but I don't really want to fly with them again so what is the use in that? Honestly I am happy to be accommodating as things often generally go wrong, but the whole experience rubbed me the wrong way. Thank you for any advice in advance!

eskbanker

The airline is responsible for providing overnight accommodation in such circumstances, but if it didn't and you didn't book into a hotel yourself, then you haven't incurred any reclaimable costs, so you're reliant on their goodwill, something for which they're not renowned!

If you disbelieve their ATC restrictions reasoning, then once you have their final response, you can escalate to AviationADR for adjudication, or ultimately court, but if the ATC restrictions were enough to put the crew out of hours then it would probably be quite difficult to disprove, despite other root causes too....