Irish budget airline Ryanair has today said it will be adding a BREXIT clause to its terms and conditions for flights in Summer 2019.
The clause, which effectively invalidates tickets if an aviation agreement isn’t reached was announced by the airlines PR executive, Kenny Jacobs who said: “We will announce our summer schedule soon enough here for the UK, but that summer schedule will have a terms and conditions saying this is subject to the regulatory environment. Once we start selling tickets that will be in the post Brexit schedule from 1st of April 2019 – typically sold from September.”
Currently, flights between the UK and the EU are covered by agreements which allow free flight without restrictions and that it is the interest of both sides for that to continue post-brexit.
Theoretically, if an agreement isn’t reached then UK airlines will be unable to fly into Europe after April 1st 2019, however, equally European airlines will be unable to fly into the UK.
The clause means that Ryanair will be able to simply cancel tickets if flights are unable to operate without compensating customers, although it says they will be refunded the ticket price.
Jacobs added “We’re calling on Brussels and the UK government to give us a regulatory condition- we were saying this two years ago and everyone was saying that was Ryanair being alarmist.
“The situation hasn’t changed for us, we have applied for a UK AOC to make sure we can fly domestic routes within the UK if we need to, we’ve also flagged to shareholders that we need to work out the situation in terms of ownership.”
