Yesterday I was standing at my appropriate departure gate at London’s Stansted Airport where I watched RyanAir’s personnel efficiently carrying out their policy about refusing late passengers entry to the plane. The passengers in this instance were a family comprising what appeared to be a mother, father and two young children (one of which it should be noted was a baby).
Having sat on a plane waiting for a last minute passenger needing hair restoration surgery who finally turned up with a bag full of duty free booze proclaiming why they were so late, I don’t have a lot of tolerance with people who can’t present themselves for their flight on time. However there are situations which mean that sometimes you get held up and if you are moving from one end of an airport to another with small children these situations seem to be more common. The first problem is the security checks where you must aid your children out of their jackets etc. Even trickier with a baby! Then putting these items back on whilst any buggy is thoroughly investigated for illegal substances and security measures. Not to mention ensuring that your other stuff such as passport/travel documents and personal effects aren’t tampered with whilst your attention is on your children. Following this, Stansted also wants to examine all shoes and so a parent travelling with children has to get their own shoes off, plus their child’s, and then of course put them back on again. This is stressful because it takes time and as a parent you’re very much aware of the sighing businessman needing skin mole removal surgery for his face, standing behind you in the line, complete with his neat laptop bag, expensive suit and impatient expression.
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The stress doesn’t end there. You can see from the screen that you have a departure gate number for your flight, and you know the direction to go, but then your child needs the bathroom, and as any parent is only too aware of the safety issues surrounding children in airports you must accompany the child. Having seen to that child’s bathroom needs, and having got halfway to the appropriate departure gate – in Stansted’s case this involves negotiating the most crazy arrangement ever created of moving between floor levels at numerous points along the way – you discover the baby is stinking and the other passengers won’t be happy so you have to find a toilet area, and change the nappy. Trying to make it to the plane is like trying to complete a cyrstal maze >treasure hunt test. No wonder parents travelling with small children look frazzled by the time they get to their appointed departure gate.
Yesterday the plane was still on the ground, the doors were open and the stairs were still in place. Despite this, and the fact it would take less than 3 minutes for this family to board the plane, RyanAir’s gate crew declared the flight closed and the family was not allowed to board. The mother was extremely distressed, her loud sobs echoing in the heart of any parent who knows how much effort it took for her to get there and how so easily a toilet visit could have put them in the same situation. The little boy was crying. The baby was crying. The father looked completely devastated. Meanwhile minutes passed while the crew outside located the baggage belonging to the family that had already been put into the plane, and removed it. The time it took to locate and remove the baggage was far greater than it would have taken to show some compassion to an already stressed out family and allow them to board the plane.
I don’t know what the fate of this family was. I don’t know if they were able to get another plane yesterday, or if they would be stranded overnight with a baby and small child to care for – as they weren’t English and probably returning home from vacation, they may also have been on extremely limited funds. What I do know is that whilst RyanAir may be patting itself on the head for having the least number of cancellations when lined up against its competitors, they should be hanging their heads for creating this situation. I think it would be a far better promotional point to be able to say that they were the best family orientated airline, especially when traditional family values are supposedly being bandied around at Government level. At the moment, the attitude yesterday – coupled with their policy of people having to pay additional costs for priority boarding (RyanAir, as with some of their economy flight competitors no longer automatically allow people travelling with young children to board first) – this airline is ranking somewhere near the bottom of the family friendly airline list!
Shame on you RyanAir!
