Ryanair's
Michael O'Leary, the king of low-cost travel, may be regretting a recent decision to move some of his operations from France to
Spain: a Spanish court has ruled he has no right to force customers to print their own boarding passes.
A judge in Barcelona said that, under international air travel conventions, Ryanair can neither demand passengers turn up at the airport with their boarding pass, nor charge them €40 (£34) if they do not.
"I declare abusive and, therefore, null, the clause in the contract by which Ryanair obliges the passenger to take a boarding pass to the airport," Judge Barbara Cordoba said.
"The customary practice over the years has been that the obligation to provide the boarding pass has always fallen on the airline."
Ryanair said today that it would appeal against the decision, which threatens its model of scrapping check-in desks and replacing them with online boarding cards and airport bag drops.
"The court is wrong," said Ryanair spokesman Daniel de Carvalho, who claims that forgetting a boarding pass is almost the same as forgetting a passport. "You need the boarding card to fly. If a passenger arrives without a boarding card, we find an ad hoc solution to their problem. The €40 is a penalty for doing that. We serve the boarding card in exactly the same way that the passenger makes the booking, by internet."
De Carvalho went on: "If the problem is the €40 charge for this service, we'll simply stop offering the service. That, of course, will mean the passenger who arrives without a boarding card cannot fly."
The case was brought by Dan Miró, a Spanish lawyer whose online company, retrasos.net, takes legal action against airlines on behalf of passengers. Miró, who turned up at the airport in Girona, north-east Spain, in May without a boarding pass for his flight to Alghero, in Sardinia, and had to pay €40.
In the same case Miró won compensation from Ryanair to cover the cost of a train journey from Madrid to Barcelona after his Ryanair flight to Barcelona was cancelled because of volcanic ash.
"I like Ryanair in some ways, but it seems to believe it can make up all the rules," said Miró. "It has to observe the law too. The conventions on air travel are ratified not just by Spain but by Ireland and the United Kingdom as well."
Last week O'Leary said Ryanair would
close its service hub at Marseille airport after a French court ruled that staff working there had to pay French taxes and social security. Ryanair had argued that the employees work on Irish aircraft and so could have cheaper Irish contracts.
Marseille is the airline's only French hub. The work will be redistributed to Spain, Italy and Lithuania. Twenty-two of the 158 airports that Ryanair serves are in Spain.
Zakładki