Passengers must wait for their money, warn airlines
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MANY disrupted passengers will have to wait some time to have their expenses reimbursed, airlines admitted yesterday.
As travel chaos continued yesterday, airlines said they were still processing claims relating to last month's airport closures, even before the recurrence of problems this week.
Under EU regulations, European airlines are obliged to issue refunds for cancelled flights if passengers opt to use another form of transport, but if passengers wait for a flight with their original carrier, the airline is liable for reasonable additional expenses, such as hotel and meal costs.
Ryanair said it had begun issuing refunds to passengers stranded during April, but there was a large volume of paperwork still to deal with.
"Thousands" of requests had been received and it would take some time to assess the full cost, although the airline planned to give an update on this on June 1, a spokesperson said.
Aer Lingus said it had begun reimbursing passengers, but did not yet have figures on the numbers or costs.
Regarding complaints about consumer difficulties accessing their helplines, it said that it had assigned additional resources to its customer centre to deal with the huge volume of calls, and it was recruiting extra staff.
"Throughout the disruption, which has been unprecedented in scale, we have received up to 500pc of our normal daily call volumes. As a result the call- waiting periods have been lengthy and we are doing all possible to work through the volume and restore normal services," the airline said.
The European Consumer Centre said it was also receiving a huge number of calls from consumers and had published details of how to make claims on its website at www.eccireland.ie.
- Aideen Sheehan
Irish Independent
