Out of curiosity were the cancellations part of the next timetable period?
Airlines organise timetables broadly into winter and summer - winter running from the Sunday of the weekend of the October clock change to the Saturday of the weekend of the March clock change, and Summer from March to October.
If you book a flight in advance of the changeover dates there’s always a risk of timetable changes across all airlines, particularly on low frequency routes - it’s certainly not specific to Ryanair. Airlines will be looking at bookings in advance and they will often change schedules or indeed cancel flights if they’re not performing as well as the airline expected.
I don’t know, but based on the timescales you suggest, probably. I don’t have a particular problem about schedule changes, I understand it happens and the reasons why. What I do have a problem with is the specifics.
It was return flights for the four of us on a family holiday at half term, to an airport in Europe that typically has one flight per day from each of a small number of U.K. airports. I specifically booked from a non London airport as the flights were much cheaper than Stansted (which is closer to us) to the same destination. I also booked Friday to Friday as this was substantially cheaper than Saturday to Saturday. Having paid nearly £700 for the flights (bags, priority seats, and credit card charges) I got an email the following evening to say the flights I had booked were now cancelled. Options proffered were:
1) transfer to the Saturday - Saturday flights from the same airport and pay the difference (about £400 when I was booking the previous day)
2) transfer to the Friday - Friday flights from Stansted and pay the difference (about £300 when I was booking the previous day)
3) full refund.
This is where it gets interesting. In the 24hours since I had booked, the price of the alternative flight options had more or less doubled, meaning that the extra I had to pay would have been around £600-700.
Obviously I chose the refund, which was eventually credited to my credit card about 10 days later. Not, however, in time for my credit card bill, so effectively I didn’t have the money for a month.
The timing all seemed a little odd, and the cynic in me is reasonably convinced that I was the first booking on the flight (we had the pick of the seats on the seat selector), which triggered some sort of alert at Ryanair towers; Perhaps the flight was never intended to operate and my booking highlighted this. However the sudden significant cost increases on the alternatives was, I suspect deliberate.
In the end we flew EZY to an alternative airport a further 2 hours away from our destination, which, as it turned out, was cheaper than the original FR booking, even when we added in the car hire!
