Public Relations 101 needed @Ryanair.

@all the ryanair-ites trying to play devil’s advocate:

You are rather a sad bunch. I do admire your bravery, in spite of your anonymity, for pi$$ing into the wind, but I think you will find you are loosing a fighting battle. Take a look at the incoming links to this page – they are all in support of Jason as far as I can see (can’t read all of them, too many, better things to do).

I came to this page by searching in Google to see if anyone else knew about the 0.00 glitch (or feature, who cares) because *some fair old time ago* I twice managed a fiddle with the booking system. It is long gone, but I would be slightly more likely to fly RyanAir again if I could find another flaw.

So who cares if the title is misleading? That’s what blogging is all about – humour, rumours, etc. Get a life. You are clearly lacking one if you feel you have to spout bile at someone who did absolutely nothing wrong.

He even said himself that he didn’t take it any further, i.e. he admitted openly that he hadn’t substantiated the claim, but given that this is the 535th comment (unless someone got in while I was typing), you can appreciate that it is interesting for the public.

In fact it is not the title that raised interest, but the stupidity and arrogance of RyanAir staff that got this into international news. And rightly so. If not for that arrogance and rudeness, you wouldn’t know it existed and you wouldn’t be writing your petty, lowbrow comments. I bet you hate walking on asphalt, it must rip hell out of your knuckles.

Why the blast at WordPress? It’s a good, honest CMS and it’s free. That doesn’t mean you have to pay to click the download button, or purchase vital missing pieces of code. Nor does it charge you five quid for a cruddy sandwich. It’s good enough, it seems, for (correct me if I am wrong)::

New York Times (a little more upstream than RyanAir, albeit not a shoddy airline), Wall Street Journal Magazine (more ‘idiot bloggers’), and the list goes on. The interesting thing is how much prettier they are than RyanAir’s website. But of course it’s not a fair comparison because you are so understaffed and overstretched.

Which takes me on to my next point. This seems a good reason to really start thinking about who you fly with. I’ve flown a hell of a lot with RA. I used to be an opportunist flyer and grab flights for pennies or a few quid, sometimes just speculatively.

Then I really started to wonder if I was doing the right thing. Skimping here and saving there… how old is the fleet? How experienced are those pilots? How many of their simulated crash landings can those 747s take? How many more can I take?

The cabin crew member who pulled too hard during the demonstration and accidentally inflated her life jacket (until then I always thought dummies were used for safety purposes, by which I mean life jackets and not stewardesses).

One of the most frightening moments was an extremely heavy landing on an empty Prestwick runway followed by a handbrake turn at high speed shortly after. Why? Because I paid less? It actually hurt my back (though the possible reason was me clenching every muscle in my body and thus inadvertently compressing a vertebra), and that is the only time that ever happened on landing.

Now I really have to say (especially after reading this) that I am not willing to put my safety in the hands of an airline that clearly has little or no concern for its customers. And certainly not the safety of my family, now that my days of wild abandon have had to be wildly abandoned.

Good service and well-trained staff really makes you feel safer. The first time I flew Qatar, I felt so completely coddled in the care of the wonderful cabin crew, I had the overwhelming impression they wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me. That they personally would make sure I was safe while hurtling through the air at 30,000 feet. And that was in economy class.

Even Virgin made me feel that I was unlikely to be flown into a mountain by a demented, suicidal pilot. I think it’s Richard’s beard. He will probably don a Superman costume and zoom to the rescue at many times the speed of sound.

But RyanAir – you took the last biscuit here. You’re really not even that cheap in the long run for a lot of destinations – Skavsta, for example – you have the cheek to call it Stockholm. It’s a twenty quid bus ride from Stockholm.

Journeys with flight changes are only for the incredibly determined.

As someone else here said, it will all be good for the RA business model until something goes wrong. You see, Air France can crash as many Airbuses as it wants, but its reputation won’t take long to bounce back. It has a smooth and shiny surface that mud will slide off.

RyanAir – with this attitude and your growing reputation for customer disregard, it will only take one serious incident for people to say, “We should have seen it coming.”

The story’s here: http://www.cracked.com/article_17215_7-most-idiotic-corporate-temper-tantrums.html

I cannot believe an airline supposedly professional and in the public eye can behave in such a fashion. This is a perfect example of how a big corporate can appear to throw its weight around and alienate its customers. Sure there is a problem with the website, dont take it emotionally RyanAir. Take a rational stance, make a public note of the problem and explain what you are going to do to fix it. Turning it into a school yard pitch battle is not the way to do this. To my mind the perception of Ryanair is that of a hormonal adolescant teenager who lashes out at any critiscism. Accept the mistakes and problems and move on. No website is perfect, most have flaws.

Start treating the public as customers with the respect that they deserve instead of behaving as a money grabbing corporate.

This is definately one of the worst PR episodes in 2009!

http://www.cracked.com/article_17215_7-most-idiotic-corporate-temper-tantrums.html

I’m fairly sure I’m not the only one.

If this is true, you would appear to have the makings of a legal argument of sorts.

By ‘argument’ I mean that it’s entirely possible you could be legally in the right or that Ryanair could. (But see the P.S. below, in any case).

You would say that you had made a contract. (Obvious really, but it has to be said) and you would say they broke it by failing to honour the booking.

They would say it is a condition of the contract that you receive an email confirmation to complete the contract.

[In England as well as probably in nearly all common-law jurisdictions --- which because of its history first as a possession of the English Crown then subsequently as a former (1801-1926) part of the UK, the Republic of Ireland is such a common-law jurisdiction --- a Condition is a Term in a contract which if you breach it, is fatal to the contract (as opposed to a Warranty which if you breach it, the other party just gets damages)]

Ryanair might say it’s just common sense that you should get a confirmation of the booking before relying on it. and you are an eejit for thinking otherwise. And therefore there was no contract at all.

You would might it’s common sense that the website confirmed your price and the agreement between you, and then told you you had paid the agreed price and you are entitled to rely on that representation, and they are a bunch of fecking eejits for apparently losing your booking.

Now the last time I looked (about 2 years ago) there is actually some doubt about the exact time when an electronic contract is made in English law as the precedents are confused and pre-Internet and are about Victorian postal contracts and ships and 1970s telexes anyway, and in /any/ event there is no guarantee that Irish law would necessarily develop in the same way post-independence as English Law did anyway (though it might be persuasive, like all common-law countries may be).

So that’s what I mean about the possibility for an argument. Either side could be (legally) in the right. [Morally, Ryanair are never to be in the right to me....].

You would no doubt say there is no legal requirement to receive an email confirmation (emails can go astray .. e.g. in spam filters) as a &&Condition&& of the contract when you have just had the confirmation on screen that they have agreed to the price (consideration) and also to the time and date etc.

And if you were only told this AFTER agreeing to the terms of the contract, then even if it was enforceable as a Condition, then that Condition can’t be part of the contract in any event and thus not binding.

You won’t get anywhere with Ryan Scare customer service. I can almost guarantee this.

In my opinion, the only way to deal with companies like this is to put in writing what you are asking for (in money terms), give them 14 days to pay (or agree), and then issue a Claim (you probably still call it a Summons in the Republic) in whatever equivalent you have of Petty Debts or Small Claims Track.

But be prepared for a similar attack in the media against you, if this case is anything to go by.

Remember that in any claim that a contract was breached, one can claim for all losses that were a direct consequence of the claimed breach but here, as you got on the flight, the difference in price as you have claimed it would appear to be the only pecuniary loss. (If it was me this happened to, I’d ask for a single euro as nominal damages for ‘disappointment’ and the stress of the uncertainty you experienced).

PS: This is not legal advice. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on TV. I don’t hold myself out as having special skill and knowledge. Anyone who thinks they can rely on something they read on a blog written by the 513th pseudonymous poster without getting professional advice really would be an ‘idiot lunatic blogger’, and in need not only of professional advice but maybe professional help, too.