Leader comment: Ryanair's winging it again
Ryanair's latest decision to cancel 50 flights a week from Glasgow and Edinburgh is a fiasco for travellers and an illustration of the budget airline's disregard for its customers.
Passengers buy flights in good faith, and there should be no question over the airline fulfilling its part of the bargain.
Ryanair hooks people in with cheap fares, but what we have found here is that the organisation isn’t adequately resourced to provide the service it has advertised. The low fares looked attractive to customers but the reality was that the tickets didn’t exist, because the company had seriously over-promised what it said it could deliver.
Of course, Ryanair knows that customers will come back, because they will continue to offer fares that undercut other operators, but they should be hauled over the coals by the Civil Aviation Authority – and if that body doesn’t have the necessary power, then by the Scottish Government. Airlines like Ryanair want air passenger duty abolished in Scotland. How much stronger their case would be if they would stop playing fast and loose with the paying public.