Total Contempt for Customers (Ryanair)

Member Name: rebs99

Product:	Ryanair
Date:	20/03/03 (488 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap tickets

Disadvantages: Non existent

My husband and flew once last year on Ryanair from Stansted to Nimes and I would never fly with them again!

Yes, the tickets were ridiculously cheap, but there is one thing you can't put a price on and that is being treated with even the tiniest bit of respect by a company and its staff. I have flown with both Easyjet and go (while it existed) and neither of them exuded the contempt which Ryanair does for its customers. The message you get at every stage from the company is "Your tickets are dirt cheap, so we will treat you like dirt".

I'm not bothered about leg room, food on the plane, obscure remote airports etc. It's the rest of it that bothers me, as our experience shows.

Outbound flight
One miserable check-in desk, which is not even announced until 1 1/2 before take off time. Everyone rushes to join long queue snaking around Stansted and getting tangled up with other long Ryanair queues. Queue remains static for another 15 minutes before Ryanair actually deign to start checking us in. Even charter airlines do better than this!

1 hour delay quickly becomes two as Stansted is fogged in - fair enough, not Ryanair's fault. However, we are in constant contact with my parents out in France, who are with friends booked on the return flight from Nimes that night - which obviously can't leave until our flight has arrived. The only reason these friends know their return flight will be seriously late is because of our text messages. Ryanair isn't telling anyone in Nimes anything.

We finally board in the unholy rush for seats. There is no reason why Ryanair can't at least do what Easyjet does and give people laminated number cards according to when they check in, thus doing away with this demeaning ritual.

We then sit on the plane. And sit. And sit. And sit. No-one tells us anything. Any enquiries directed at the cabin crew are met with outright rudeness. After an hour sit
ting there we are told that we are still waiting for someone to take the previous lot of passengers' luggage off and load ours. I now know we should consider ourselves lucky that the plane didn't just take off anyway, luggage or no luggage!!

Arrive Nimes at nearly 2am almost 4 hours late - only 2 of these are due to fog.

Return flight
We arrive at Nimes airport, check in and are immediately told that there is an hour's delay. The restaurant at Nimes is shut. There is nothing anywhere near the airport. We buy a packet of biscuits and sit outside on the grass overlooking the runway becauise there are not enough seats inside the airport.

Arrive back at Stansted at well gone 1am, feeling incredibly glad that we chose to drive to the airport.

This year, I have just booked two tickets with BA to Marseilles out of Gatwick, at civilised times. After booking I checked, out of curiousity, what flights to Nimes would have cost us with Ryanair. It came out over ten pounds more!!! Easyjet, BA or bmi will have our custom in the future. Not Ryanair.

Summary: