Plane talking

IT'S A familiar enough story — in December, Ryanair charged a family £110 to change the name on a flight booking after one of the family accidentally entered it incorrectly. A new seat would only have cost £65.

Darren Bliss, 57, was booking a flight for his son's girlfriend from Stansted to Grenoble when his not-so-smart phone automatically entered his surname instead of the girlfriend's.

He subsequently spotted the mistake and contacted Ryanair. They told him the name change would be £110.

An aggrieved Darren said: “It was a straightforward, genuine mistake that must be pretty easy to correct. They have it right there on the computer in front of them, so I don't know where the £110 goes. It's farcical.”

Ah, Darren, you have much to learn. There are sound reasons Ryanair charged you that money. And when you went to the Daily Mail with your story, central office in Dublin would have been full of staff saying, good job, well done everybody, and high-fiving each other.

What you didn't grasp, Darren, is that cases like yours are good for business. They are at one time advertising tools (“What, you can get a flight for £65 to Grenoble — that’s that place on Ski Sunday, innit?”), as well as acting as excellent warnings to those flying Ryanair. The lesson is abundantly clear: check forensically every detail on your booking form before pressing the send button.

Standardisation, and consequently lower overheads (fewer staff etc) make Ryanair one of the most profitable airlines in existence.

But were the airline to adopt a laissez-faire attitude to customers making mistakes, staffing levels would consequently rise.

TO PUT the Ryanair ethos into perspective, Darren Bliss only needed to look back a few years to the case of Jane O’Keeffe. She was Ryanair’s one millionth customer in 2002. In a gesture of publicity-generating goodwill, Ryanair had awarded the Dublin woman “free flights for life”.

But over the years Ms O’Keeffe found the flights progressively harder to access, to the point where eventually the case ended up in litigation. The mother of two was eventually awarded €67,500 by the High Court.

A public relations disaster, you might think. But Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary knew what he was doing – a seed was planted in the public mind that here was a man not worth fighting. He was prepared to take a mother-of-two the whole way to the High Court to save what must have been a minimal amount of money – after all, a free flight on a Ryanair plane costs the airline very little; many flights are never 100 per cent full.

So the message was clear – if you have a complaint against Ryanair you’d better be prepared to go the whole hog, because the airline won’t back down.

As part of your business model, it’s not a bad reputation to have – and Michael O’Leary has deployed the ethos against aircraft pilots, manufacturers, airports and several governments.

Certainly Mr Bliss reporting Ryanair to the Daily Mail was never going to cause Mr O’Leary any problems. The opposite in fact. The Ryanair message had gone out loud and clear.