An elderly couple have condemned Ryanair after they were forced to pay £110 to print their outbound boarding passes.
Ruth Jaffe, 79, and her husband Peter, 80, mistakenly downloaded their return boarding pass instead of the outgoing one on the first leg of their journey from Stansted Airport to Bergerac, France, last Friday.
Mrs Jaffe, from Ealing, said she only realised she had printed the wrong tickets after arriving at the airport.
Hey @Ryanair, my parents who are in their 70s and 80s, had accidentally downloaded the return flight boarding card instead of the outgoing ones and you charged them £110 to print them at the airport. £110 for 2 pieces of paper which took 1 minute. Shame on you
— Old School House Venosc 💙 (@old_school_alps) August 13, 2023
“I was then told that I had to go to the Ryanair desk to get a boarding card, and there they charged me £55 per person," she told the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme.
“[I was] horrified.”
It comes after Mr and Mrs Jaffe’s daughter hit out at the airline on social media for charging her parents’ over “an honest mistake”.
“£110 for 2 pieces of paper which took 1 minute. Shame on you,” she wrote on social media site X.
She said her parents also had to pay extra to sit next to each other, despite her father being disabled.
The post, which sparked a huge backlash against the airline, has been viewed more than 13 million times.
Asked about the social media reaction, Mrs Jaffe said: “People hate Ryanair, I think.”
She added: “If you’re elderly and haven’t been brought up using computers from day one, it can be very difficult.”
Mr Jaffe chimed in: “It’s also the money-making aspect, like the fact we had to pay extra to sit together.”
A spokesperson for Ryanair said in a statement: “All passengers travelling with Ryanair agree to check-in online before arriving at their departure airport and all passengers are sent an email/SMS, reminding them to do so 24hrs before departure.
“We regret that these passengers ignored their email reminder and failed to check-in online.”
