Ryanair: “We messed up”

40,000 passengers affected by flight cancellations

Ryanair has published the full list of flight cancellations between Thursday 21^st September and Tuesday 31^st October. These cancellations have been allocated where possible to Ryanair’s bigger base airports, and routes with multiple daily frequencies, so that Ryanair can offer these disrupted customers the maximum number of alternate flights and routes in order to minimise inconvenience to them.

The full list of these flight cancellations (from Thurs 21^st to Thurs Oct 31^st) now appear on the Ryanair.com website and customers affected by these cancellations will be emailed with offers of alternative flights or full refunds, and details of their EU261 compensation entitlement.

The airports where one line of flying will be removed for the next 6 weeks are as follows, (these airports have been selected because of the high frequency of flights Ryanair operates to/from these airports where customers can be offered the most accommodating options):

Barcelona	1 of 12 lines of flights
Brussels Charl	1 of 13 lines of flights
Dublin	1 of 23 lines of flights
Lisbon	1 of 4 lines of flights
London Stan	2 of 41 lines of flights
Madrid	1 of 13 lines of flight
Milan Bergamo	1 of 14 lines of flights
Porto	1 of 8 lines of flights
Rome Fiumi	1 of 3 lines of flights

While Ryanair sincerely regrets and apologises for these cancellations, it pointed out that they will affect less than 2% of all customers over the next 6 weeks, and the majority of these passengers will be offered alternative flights on the same or next day. For those passengers who cannot, or do not wish to take the alternative flights offered they will receive a full refund and their EU261 compensation.

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said: “While over 98% of our customers will not be affected by these cancellations over the next 6 weeks, we apologise unreservedly to those customers whose travel will be disrupted, and assure them that we have done our utmost to try to ensure that we can re-accommodate most of them on alternative flights on the same or next day.

“Ryanair is not short of pilots – we were able to fully crew our peak summer schedule in June, July and August – but we have messed up the allocation of annual leave to pilots in September and October because we are trying to allocate a full year’s leave into a 9 month period from April to December. This issue will not recur in 2018 as Ryanair goes back onto a 12 month calendar leave year from 1^st Jan to 31^st December 2018.

“This is a mess of our own making. I apologise sincerely to all our customers for any worry or concern this has caused them over the past weekend. We have only taken this decision to cancel this small proportion of our 2,500 daily flights so that we can provide extra standby cover and protect the punctuality of the 98% of flights that will be unaffected by these cancellations.”

click here for full list of cancelled flights.