Subterfuge by budget airline? Missed flight – was charged for transfer
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 27 Jul, 2023
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While they shouldn’t have lied like that you legitimately missed your flight anyway. Airlines always require you to be at the gate some number of minutes before the flight, usually at least 10.
Departure time is when they plan to actually move the aircraft. They have to get everyone seated and all the luggage stowed, the last possible boarding has to be some minutes before the departure time in order to accomplish this.
Next time you should allow more time!
A check of Ryanair’s website:
You missed your flight by 10 minutes.
With no evidence at hand, I had little grounds to argue my claim for a transfer flight without the expensive fee.
If I am in a similar situation again, a photograph with both the flight information and clock-time displayed at the gate, would be evidence to hedge against claims that I had arrived at the gate sometime after 12.00pm.
A photograph with the gate clock displaying 11.50pm would have curtailed the ticket clerk from citing 12.10pm as the time when the passenger first met the gate staff. The fee requested would not have been incurred if the correct time of 11.50pm was considered by the information desk.
This may seem a pedantic point but for the airline it is not: Ryanair benefited financially from the inability of the passenger to assert the earlier time.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘