Expat plans to fly around Europe in the coming weeks on budget airline Ryanair may fail to take off as the airline scraps thousands of flights because of failing to manage holiday leave for pilots.
Around 2,000 flights have already been cancelled, and more may follow as disgruntled pilots hold out for new contracts realising they hold all the bargaining chips.
As the negotiations rumble on, the casualties will be thousands of expats with their plans to fly ruined.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary admitted the management bungle at the company’s annual general meeting in Dublin.
He confirmed pilots were offered a £10,600 bonus to work 2,500 extra days, but that many have rejected the terms and asked for improved contracts.
More pilots hired
The airline also says an extra 150 pilots have been hired in the past two weeks in a bid to avert the crisis.
O’Leary has said that the airline is planning to reclaim a week of pilots’ leave to prevent any further disruption. Any due to take a four-week block of holiday in the next few months because of changes to annual leave rotas may be told to cut that to three weeks with an extra week in January.
The debacle is estimated to have cost the airline £22 million.
Ryanair is Europe’s largest budget airline.
The firm claims to fly 131 million passengers a year between more than 200 destinations in 33 countries.
The airline is believed to have 4,200 pilots at 86 bases around Europe who fly more than 400 Boeing 737 jets.
315,000 passengers rerouted
So far, 315,000 customers have received emails advising flight changes and offering alternative flights or refunds. Extra customer service staff have been hired to deal with the changes.
Around half have rebooked on other Ryanair flights.
“We apologise sincerely to each of the 315,000 customers whose original flights were cancelled in September and October, while we work to resolve this short-term rostering failure,” said a spokesman.
“We have taken on extra customer service teams to speed up the rate at which we accommodate and action alternative flight requests or refund applications. We expect to have most of these completed by the end of this week.
“Most of these requests are being dealt with online, but as our call centres and chat lines are extremely busy, we ask affected customers to bear with us as we do everything we can to respond to their requests and try to resolve any problems we have created for them, for which we again sincerely apologise.”
