How not to organise a football tour

Snickers Man

A familiar Ryanair story in the papers recently.

To summarise: a group of kids on a football tour booked a connecting series of flights with Ryanair. When the first leg of their return flight was delayed and they were late for their check in at Stansted they were not let on the plane in strict accordance with Ryanair's rules.

Some excerpts from the paper's reports:

The soccer players, aged between 12 and 16, made it home after a 460km drive across England, an early-morning ferry back to Dublin and a three-hour coach trip back to Galway.
... organisers of the trip say the missed flight cost them over €3,700 in coach hire, food and the ferry home.
...The bills were paid out of the organiser's pockets, and a fundraising event would probably be held to try to pay them back.

Vice-president of Mervue United George Guest said club officials would be meeting in the coming days to decide what action, if any, to take against the airline.

"We left at 5am on Monday, getting home at 2.30pm today. We're pissed off with Ryanair - they didn't want to accommodate us. Fair enough if it was adults, but it was 47 kids," Mr Long said.

"We'll have to see what happens now and what Ryanair have to say."

Coach Donal Devery said ... that the airline's attitude was not acceptable.

The low-cost airline has lost out on future business from the young players. Asked if they would travel with Ryanair again, there was a resounding "No" from all of them.

The airline said ... that it was a point-to-point airline and thus not responsible for missed connecting flights.



Why is any of this a surprise? Didn't the organisers know that Ryanair is a point-to-point as opposed to low cost airline and takes NO responsibility for connecting flights? Didn't they know that O'Leary gets a lump in his pants listening to people whinging about breaking the rules that they have signed up to when things don't go in their favour?

Whoever decided to bring a group of young kids on a trip that depended on Ryanair connections should be hauled over the coals. There are plenty of other airlines, I am sure, who would have undertaken to deliver the boys to their connecting flight on time and if not to have enabled them to travel with alternative arrangements.

Certainly, such a round trip might have been more expensive than that quoted by Ryanair. But in the long run, would it have been nearly four grand more expensive, which is the additional cost incurred by depending on a Ryanair connection?

"We'll never fly Ryanair again!" yeah right. If a connecting flight was what they needed, they should never have flown Ryanair this time.

My sympathies are not with Mr O'Leary, I hasten to add. But they are very much with those companies who would deliver the level of service the boys needed but who are shunned by people who think they can get the same level of service from a company which makes no promises to do so.

el tel

From the age of 11 to 14 I regularly made the following non-stop journey (and back) with a huge group of kids (well over 47 of us!) under supervision:

Bus Belfast-Larne, Boat to Stranraer, Bus down to Dover (overnight), Boat to Ostende, Train to Rome (overnight).

We had a frigging blast, both going and coming home and we arrived totally psyched every year we did it. Kids love this sort of adventure and can't believe it was misery all the way for these ones. I have to say that either these kids from the soccer team are total pussies or else we are just hearing the whining attitudes of their adult organisers who are looking to cover their asses, have a dig at Ryanair and/or publicize themselves.

Jakey

I agree with Snickers Man, Ryanair has received plenty of bad publicity in the past it definitely wasnt a good decision to travel with them on that trip.

In the past I worked in retail and I noticed a huge amount of people would constantly buy the cheapest phone and not spend the extra twenty odd pounds for a nokia and then come back extremely angry when the multi national corporation they were trying to run from their £49 ready to go phone was suffering. Often what you pay is what you get.

The 3 hour coach trip from Dublin to Galway was on the cards either way,