Ryanair today confirmed that it has published the full list of flight cancellations between 21st September and 31st October. These cancellations have been allocated where possible, to Ryanair’s bigger base airports, and routes with multiple daily frequencies so that Ryanair can offer these disrupted customers the maximum number of alternate flights and routes in order to minimise inconvenience to them.
The full list of these flight cancellations for the period will appear on the Ryanair.com website later today, and customers affected by these cancellations will be emailed with offers of alternative flights or full refunds, and details of their EU261 compensation entitlement.
Airports have been selected where there is a high frequency of flights which Ryanair operates to/from them and where customers can be offered the most accommodating options.
The airports where one line of flying will be removed for the next 6 weeks are as follows:
| Barcelona | 1 of 12 lines of flights |
| Brussels Charleroi | 1 of 13 lines of flights |
| Dublin | 1 of 23 lines of flights |
| Lisbon | 1 of 4 lines of flights |
| London Stansted | 2 of 41 lines of flights |
| Madrid | 1 of 13 lines of flight |
| Milan Bergamo | 1 of 14 lines of flights |
| Porto | 1 of 8 lines of flights |
| Rome Fiumicino | 1 of 3 lines of flights |
For those passengers who cannot, or do not wish to take the alternative flights offered they will receive a full refund and their EU261 compensation which is expected to exceed €20million.
Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said: “While over 98% of our customers will not be affected by these cancellations over the next 6 weeks, we apologise unreservedly to those customers whose travel will be disrupted, and assure them that we have done our utmost to try to ensure that we can re-accommodate most of them on alternative flights on the same or next day.”
It also emerged that 140 pilots had recently left the Irish budget carrier for rival Norwegian. Commenting on this Michael O’Leary said “Ryanair is not short of pilots – we were able to fully crew our peak summer schedule in June, July and August – but we have messed up the allocation of annual leave to pilots in Sept and Oct because we are trying to allocate a full year’s leave into a 9 month period from April to December. This issue will not recur in 2018 as Ryanair goes back onto a 12 month calendar leave year from 1st Jan to 31st December 2018.
This is a mess of our own making. I apologise sincerely to all our customers for any worry or concern this has caused them over the past weekend. We have only taken this decision to cancel this small proportion of our 2,500 daily flights so that we can provide extra standby cover and protect the punctuality of the 98% of flights that will be unaffected by these cancellations.”
Fortunately, flights out of Cardiff Airport appear to be unaffected by these changes.