Ealing Couple Hit Headlines After Row with Ryanair
International coverage of dispute over boarding pass charge
A Ryanair plane. Picture: Raimond Spekking
August 16, 2023
A dispute between a couple from Ealing and Ryanair has received international coverage after they were charged £110 to print out boarding passes.
Retired GP Ruth Jaffe and her husband Peter, who are aged 79 and 80 respectively, were flying from London Stansted to Bergerac in France last Friday (11 August).
They had already checked in for their flight and paid a premium to ensure they were sitting together, as Peter is disabled, bringing the total cost of the tickets to £278. However, inadvertently, they had printed out the boarding passes for the return flight.
When the mistake was spotted at the desk, they were charged an extra £110 to reprint the outbound boarding passes, a process that took check in staff less than a minute.
Their daughter took to Twitter to express her outrage at the case saying, “Hey @Ryanair, my parents who are in their 70s and 80s, had accidentally downloaded the return flight boarding card instead of the outgoing ones and you charged them £110 to print them at the airport. £110 for 2 pieces of paper which took 1 minute. Shame on you”. The post has received over 100,000 likes.
The story was picked up across the media with reports on the BBC and numerous newspapers and TV channels including those overseas.
Ryanair were unwilling to back down on the charge. A spokesperson for the airline said: ‘As per Ryanair’s T&C’s, which these passengers agreed to at the time of booking, these passengers failed to check in online for their outbound flight from Stansted Airport (11 Aug) despite being advised to do so via email the day before travel (10 Aug) and therefore were correctly charged the airport check-in fee of £55 per passenger.’
The airline allows you to check in online up to two hours before departure or 40 minutes before departure in the airport with the £55 charge applied in the latter case.
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