Two passengers, aged 79 and 80, were hit with a $230 fee for their honest mistake. Photo / 123RF
Two passengers, aged 79 and 80, were hit with a $230 fee for their honest mistake. Photo / 123RF
A woman has blasted an airline for charging her elderly parents to reprint their forgotten boarding passes, charging them $230 (£110) for reissued tickets.
Kate Corden was furious to learn that her parents, Ruth and Peter Jaffe, aged 79 and 80, were hit with an unreasonableprinting bill by Ryanair, when they were travelling to visit her in Bergerac, France.
The couple, who had already checked in online and paid to be seated next to each other, were bemused to find that an “honest mistake” could cost them more than $100 each.
They arrived at the departure gate having accidentally printed out the return leg of the journey, only to be told they could not travel without new tickets being issued.
Their daughter Corden took to Twitter to contact the airline saying that the new tickets came with a surprise charge for printing that had cost almost as much as the flights.
“£110 for 2 pieces of paper which took 1 minute. Shame on you.”
Hey @Ryanair, my parents who are in their 70s and 80s, had accidentally downloaded the return flight boarding card instead of the outgoing ones and you charged them £110 to print them at the airport. £110 for 2 pieces of paper which took 1 minute. Shame on you
— Old School House Venosc 💙 (@old_school_alps) August 13, 2023
To add further distress, the elderly passengers were unable to sit together after being reissued the boarding passes.
Corden said that her mother had tried to pay to be seated together while checking in but that the seating choices had only been applied to the return travel.
“My dad is disabled so travelling is stressful enough,” she said.
Corden said she issued a complaint via the website after the airline was unavailable via direct messaging.
Ryanair’s website lists the cost of reissuing tickets as £20, which was far less than the £55 per ticket they were charged.
The complaint was picked up more than half a million times, and the outrage was shared by many other travellers. Corden’s parents were not alone in being surprised by airport printing charges. One said they had been charged £60 ($127) each to fly home after losing their printed boarding passes at the airport.
A spokesman for Ryanair said the fees issued for reprinting the tickets were correct.
Ryanair requires travellers to check in online at least two hours before departure or be faced with a manual check-in fee.
The airline Ryanair has strict check-in rules and penalty fees for passengers who cannot do so online. Photo / Portuguese Gravity, Unsplash
The airline shared a statement with the Herald, defending the charge, saying the passengers had been charged for having to be manually checked in, after failing to check in online.
“As per Ryanair’s T&Cs, which these passengers agreed to at the time of booking, these passengers failed to check in online for their outbound flight from Stansted Airport (11 Aug) despite being advised to do so via email the day before travel (10 Aug) and therefore were correctly charged the airport check-in fee of £55 per passenger,” read the the statement.
Earlier this year the airline charged Australian traveller Lachlan Harris $110 for failing to check in online early enough for a flight from Croatia.
Harris and his two travel companions were hit with the surprise €165 charge after turning up for their flight. They shared their shock and disgust to TikTok last month.
