Friday, January 06, 2006

Do not fly to/from Bydgoszcz

When 3 weeks ago I was land in Gdansk instead of my destination - Bydgoszcz - it was kind of funny, since I got a coach that dropped me out in my hometown on the way from Gdansk to Bydgoszcz. The weather was horrible - first snow - and we appreciated the care Ryanair took to handle the problem of its passengers.
But what happend today was a completely weird story - the weather was good - not perfect - but you could see clearly for miles - so we were sure there were going to be no problems. How wrong were we ... the plane decided not to land in Bydgoszcz due to fog (what FOG?!) - and fly to Poznan instead - leaving all of us on the ground - helpless :(
What came next was like a horror - of course we were offered to get our money back but when you book your tickets early - the price then and for the nearest flight was like 1:10 - nice solution. Or to re-schedule our flights - problem was - 200 people waiting in an endless queue - hearing that the next available flight was no sooner that in a weeks time.
In addition if you were to have a flights connection to e.g. Shannon or Derry like some of us did - you were in even more trouble - no help at all - no money return for the second flight - unless your private insurance covers that (mine claims it does - I hope so).
To cut down the number of passengers waiting to be servered - we were given small pieces of paper with Ryanair web site (wonder how I book my tickets without it) and a phone number to Dublin where we were supposed to be served.
So I decided to check the flights myself immediately - there was Orange.HotSpot and since I am used to using airport WIFI services - I was trying to connect to that one. To my surprise Orange do not provide online service to buy the access time - the only way to do that is to buy one of those scratch cards- but ... surprise ... you will not find one on THAT airport :(
Finally I got home - and find two possible connections I could you next week - reasonable expensive - but as you could suspect - not provided by Ryanair. I decided to do the last thing I could - call the phone number we were given and arrange reimbursement - to my surprise the line was dead with information stating that I should call between 9-14 and 15-19 Mon-Fri - since it is already Friday, 9pm - there is nothing I can do about that, Damn!!
Take my advice - DO NOT FLY TO/FROM Bydgoszcz

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This doesn't seem like a problem with Bydgoszcz, rather it was a problem with Ryanair. I think it is known that Ryanair is great when everything goes right, but if anything goes wrong, you risk having bad customer service or getting stuck like you have done. I don't think it's fair to blame the airport though.