Overbooking, which results in passengers who have already checked in getting dumped off a flight at the airport. Flights cancelled just hours before take-off, leaving passengers stranded abroad. Promised compensation and other expense claims first ignored, and then fought at every stage - in the hope you’ll give up and go away.
If you had to guess which low-cost airline this describes, most readers would likely guess it begins with an R. But it is easyJet that is filling the postbag to consumer champions at both the Guardian and Observer, with readers alleging wrongfully denied compensation and appalling customer service.
Two months ago AirHelp, which provides online legal help for those claiming compensation for delays, said its data showed easyJet had the worst record of any airline for paying out what is legally due.
Specialist lawyers describe how the company repeatedly puts in place legal obstacles to claims it says are perfectly legitimate. Since two major test cases went against the airlines earlier this year most carriers have been paying up without dispute – but not easyJet.
Two weeks ago it announced a pre-tax profit of £686m – up 18% on the previous year, leaving passengers further incensed, and bemused that an airline that carried 68 million customers could have such an approach.
Many of the problems appear to stem from the way it chose to react to a serious fire in May at Rome’s Fiumicino airport. This reduced the number of flights allowed in and out but, despite knowing days in advance, easyJet chose – two months into the disruption – to cancel flights a matter hours before they were due to leave.
It is the biggest airline in the UK, flying more people to and from Europe than even Ryanair, and most journeys go smoothly. But at issue is the way it responds when things go wrong. This is a flavour of what readers have been saying:
• Gary Walton’s five-day golfing break in Spain was wrecked when he and a friend were “bumped off” their flight. They had checked in online a week earlier, and had their boarding passes and seats allocated, but when they tried to check in their luggage at Luton – over two hours before take-off – they were told the flight had been overbooked.
The pair were offered a direct flight departing three days later, or a flight to Paris that morning with a connecting flight to Málaga the following evening.
Forced to abandon their trip, easyJet paid statutory compensation, but they lost the cost of the hotel, hire car and transfer. “I thought I was buying a flight, not a lottery ticket,” says Walton.
• Mags Hobson missed a funeral after a minor technical problem grounded her flight from Gibraltar back to London in July 2014. She and a friend endured a 27-hour delay that involved a long bus ride to Málaga, then a second botched attempt to get on a plane in the middle of the night. She accepted that problems occur, but what she hadn’t counted on was her subsequent 14-month battle to get the €400 compensation which she was due. Her friend gave up trying and has never received a penny.
• Katie Chang was due to fly from Rome to Gatwick in July with a friend on an 11am flight, but at 6pm the night before she was sent a text informing her it had been cancelled. Along with hundreds of other passengers, easyJet told her that she did not qualify for compensation because it was due to “extraordinary circumstances” – the get-out clause that allows airlines not to pay up.
When the Guardian rang the airport to ask about the fire it emerged that airlines chose which flights to cancel with at least five days’ notice.
Related: EasyJet refuses flight cancellation compensation
• Chris Laker of Crawley arrived at Amsterdam airport to find his flight cancelled without warning. He was told that the next possible one was in two days and that he had been booked into a hotel. However, the hotel had no record of the reservation and he was forced to spend the night in the airport. The same thing happened the following evening. After 24 hours in the airport he found and paid for a hotel himself. “It cost £84 and easyJet refused to reimburse me.”
Others readers report being promised by airline staff that easyJet would cover hotel accommodation and other expenses following a delay or re-routing only to find that when they claimed, it was denied, again under the “extraordinary circumstances” rule.
Kevin Clarke, from flight delay compensation specialist lawyers Bott & Co, says his firm receives more claims against easyJet for “denied boarding” than for any other airline. “It tends to raise the most individual arguments of any airline. It fights the majority of cases and raises complicated legal argument after complicated legal argument – making it hard for those with little or no knowledge of the law to claim, even when they have a perfectly valid case.”
He says in the past it would send successful claimants a cheque in euros rather than sterling, meaning that those with a sterling account would face bank charges. A judge eventually ordered the airline to stop doing it. “We have the weight of the law behind us, but it’s not so easy for a person who is told by the airline that they are entitled to nothing, or who is ignored completely.”
We showed easyJet a sample dossier of 10 complaints from readers.
A spokeswoman told Money that it “fully complies with the EU’s compensation rules” and claimed “it was the only airline to obtain a ‘very good’ rating by a CAA examination into compliance”.
It added: “We aim to provide all of our customers with the highest possible levels of customer service … easyJet’s customer charter includes the promise to be ‘open and honest and putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes’.
“We have improved the claims process and customers will get an answer in three working days and payment within a further 21. By spring next year we aim to have reduced this to seven.”
She defended the decision to overbook “some” flights and maintained that, following the Rome fire, the authorities had given it less than 48 hours notice to cancel flights “on some occasions”, which was why compensation claims had been correctly turned down. “We understand this can be frustrating … but we will always pay compensation if it is due.”
0 nhận xét:
Đăng nhận xét