Ryanair to charge for ‘force majeure’ costs

Ryanair will levy a €2 charge per passenger for bookings made from next Monday to fund its costs of flight cancellations and delays where the airline is not responsible.

The lost-cost airline yesterday said that, over the past year, it has suffered costs of over €100 million from flight cancellations, delays, the provision of right to care, compensation and legal expenses that arose from more than 15,000 flight cancellations and over 2.4 million disrupted passengers.

The majority of these claims, it said, were made in three periods during which Ryanair was prevented from flying by the failure and inaction of third parties.

It called for “the unfair and discriminatory elements” of EU rules to be amended to relieve airlines of the burden of providing care in cases where the cancellations and delays are clearly not their responsibility and fault.

It said it was “discriminatory that airlines are liable for providing refunds, meals, hotels and phone calls during ATC strikes, bad weather airport closures, or (volcanic) airspace closures when even travel insurance companies avoid liability during these force majeure events, and when competing transport providers have no such force majeure liability under their equivalent EU261 regulations”.

These expenses cannot be loaded onto airlines without being passed on to passengers, it insisted. The new levy will help it to defray these costs.