If you want to know if EasyJet PLC give a damn about their customers… read on.
Sunday September 30th, 2018. We were at Malaga airport sitting in our seats in EasyJet Flight EZY1924 to Manchester, where we would connect with another EasyJet flight to Preveza in Greece, for a week with friends Jan and Sue on their new yacht. We were looking forwards to it.
The time for our flight to start taxiing away from the gate, came and went. Instead there was a procession of yellow jacketed technicians coming and going from the flight deck. The pilot came on the PA and said there was a technical fault, and he hoped we’d be under way soon. We weren’t too concerned because we’d left ourselves more than 3 hours to make the connection in Manchester.
Two hours later, still sitting on the tarmac, we were getting concerned and there were still technicians coming and going. Eventually, after sitting on the plane for more than three hours, the pilot came out and addressed us all. He said there was a computer problem that couldn’t be fixed and they were flying a new one in from Gatwick. He said we must all go back to the departure terminal and wait, and they gave us food vouchers (that didn’t quite cover the cost of a baguette and a drink).
But by this point, we knew we’d missed our connecting flight, so I left my wife in the departure lounge and I went to the EasyJet desk and explained the situation, and suggested that they look for alternative ways of getting us to Greece. Sadly, they were pretty useless. I assumed that they’d have ways of looking at the various permutations, but all they could do was suggest the next EasyJet flight from Manchester to Preveza – which wasn’t until Wednesday, so 3 days in a Manchester airport hotel!
I went back into the terminal and texted our friends, and began a long WhatsApp dialogue, where we explored just about every option.
We thought about other permutations of flights to Preveza… not just via Manchester, but perhaps via Frankfurt, or Amsterdam, or Rome, and using different carriers. We thought about the possibility of flying to Athens and doing a 4 1/2 hour bus journey to Preveza, and we thought about flying to Corfu and getting the ferry to Igoumenitsa, and a bus to Preveza. Unfortunately, when it came to putting it all together, we were still looking at getting to our destination nearly three days late. And it would mean combinations of more flights, hotels, long airport layovers, sitting in ferry terminals for 7 hours, etc.
All the possibilities were equally unacceptable, so we told our friends to carry on without us, and we’d get our money back from EasyJet and hope to reschedule the holiday. We told the staff at the EasyJet desk what we’d decided, and then drove home. We later found that the Manchester flight eventually took off nearly ten hours late.
The next day, I made a claim under the EC261 regulations for compensation. A few weeks later, we got an email saying that we were entitled to compensation.
Then a week or so later, they changed their minds…
Most of the people on the flight were returning from holidays on the Costa del Sol; they were sitting in the departure lounge relaxing, and phoning relatives to rearrange pickup times; they were mostly inconvenienced by the delay, but apparently they were entitled to EU261 compensation. We on the other hand, were subject to the same delay (including sitting in the departure lounge for 6 or 7 hours), but with additional stress of trying to rearrange our journey, and then finally realising that we weren’t just ‘inconvenienced’… we’d lost our entire holiday!
But since we had decided that there was no longer any point in us flying, EasyJet chose to hide behind a loophole, and not pay us a penny. I had an acrimonious phone call with their customer support department where they kept repeating the mantra “you didn’t actually fly so technically you weren’t delayed“.
Interestingly, they also mentioned that as a point-to-point carrier, their only obligation is to get passengers from point A to point B, so if we had flown and waited in an airport hotel for three days for the next Preveza flight, that would have been at our cost! If we’d decided on other permutations of travel, such as flights, ferries and buses, this would also have been at our cost. Even with compensation, we’d have been seriously out-of-pocket as well as losing 3 days of a 7 day holiday.
What’s ironic is that we didn’t like the Ryanair business model where everything is an ‘extra’, even luggage, and whenever there was poor customer service, their automatic response is “so sue us“; and so we used EasyJet by preference. Now we avoid EasyJet whenever there are similarly priced alternatives. We’re under no illusions… they are both stripped down services, but we still feel there should be provision for actual losses due to poor service.
So to summarise, EasyJet compensated the ‘inconvenienced’ people, because they were obligated to under EU law. But I feel that since it was an EasyJet maintenance issue that caused us to lose our entire holiday, if they were a decent company, they would have at least offered some ex-gratia payment… but they didn’t so draw your own conclusions!
