A few days ago, Ryanair’s already low reputation took another blip.
A Ryanair flight departed London Standsted bound for Thessaloniki, Greece. At this time, Thessaloniki was covered with snow and experiencing bad weather, and - as this is a rare occurence in Greece and the airport was unprepared - lots of flights were delayed or diverted, mainly to Athens (LGAV) or the nearby Kavala (LGKV). For example, two days ago, I had family members who were planning to fly out of LGTS but had to take the train & then drive to LGKV for their flight.
Not so FR8582. Probably due to higher airport prices at these two airports, they decided to divert. Probably to a good old island or mainland airport somewhere nearby in Greece, right? In fact, they were dumped three countries away in Timisoara, Romania.
The passengers were then not allowed to stay at (i.e. forced out of) the airport and told to take a long bus ride (8+ hours) to Thessaloniki.
The Greek government quickly acted and chartered an Aegean Airlines A320 up to Timisoara to take the stranded passengers back.
Thoughts on this move by Ryanair? I can understand that diverting to Timisoara may have been cheaper, but, having three focus cities in Greece, they had no excuse to divert to one of the other two that were unaffected by weather and under an hour’s flight away. While low cost airlines are excellent for us consumers and here to stay, this can be an unwanted consequence of travelling on them - in rare cases of course.
Let me know what you think below.
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