Chai Brady
An official of the Oblates Youth Service said they would be “cautious” booking with Ryanair again after their 79 strong group was stranded for hours in a French airport coming home from Lourdes.
Over the weekend, after the Lourdes volunteers had been assisting the elderly and the sick for a week, the group’s flight scheduled at 3.15pm on Saturday was cancelled.
Suzanne Phelan of the Oblates Youth Service (OYS) said they had been wary after hearing the company was cancelling thousands of flights.
“Once we heard about all the cancellations we were concerned that we would be left in this position. And then we were,” she said, “you may book with Ryanair to save money, but if they can simply abandon you in an airport…It’s a pretty arbitrary thing that you can suddenly turn around to a group of 80 people and say well, ‘see you, there’s no plane’.”
They were told by airport officials that the next flight they could get as a group would be October 14/15, after they were told their flight was cancelled at about 4.10pm.
The group “bombarded” Ryanair’s Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to draw awareness to their plight, and said they tried to organise buses to other airports as well as food for the group after the airport’s café closed.
Accommodation
After about 9pm it is believed the volunteers received an email informing them hotel accommodation and a flight the following morning at 9.45am was organised, however some of the pilgrims only arrived back to their hotel after 1am due to a lack of transport.
Apart from the flight calamity, Ms Phelan said: “It was a brilliant pilgrimage. The Oblate pilgrimage is always really well organised but this year was exceptional.”
For almost half the group it was their first time going to Lourdes with the OYS, many of them are Leaving Cert students.
Ryanair issued a statement which read: “This group were not ‘abandoned’”.
“This flight from Biarritz to Dublin (September 23) was regrettably cancelled after the inbound aircraft was unable to land at Biarritz Airport due to the closure of the runway.”
Customers were provided with refreshment vouchers and overnight hotel accommodation and boarded a replacement flight the following morning. Ryanair sincerely apologised to all customers affected by this cancellation, which was entirely beyond our control.”