Ryanair’s excessive fee to change name on ticket

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Ryanair is well known for punishing its passengers for their human errors. So it’s not the best airline for absent-minded professors and other people with reading and spelling difficulties. If you misspell your name on your booking, Ryanair will charge you 160 euro to correct it.

Fortunately, litigation prone Germans regularly help to make the world a better place. This time an annoyed German passenger lodged a claim against Ryanair for having to pay such an excessive fee. And he won. The court ruled that Ryanair must reimburse the passenger.

Yes Mr O’Leary, I see your hand up. What would you like to say?

PEOPLE SAY THE PASSENGER IS ALWAYS RIGHT, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT - THEY’RE ****ING NOT. SOMETIMES THEY ARE WRONG AND THEY NEED TO BE TOLD SO. AND OTHER PASSENGERS ARE NOT GOING TO GET A REIMBURSEMENT SO **** OFF.

  

Thank you Mr O’Leary, that’s enough ****’s for today.

The case was about Mr Heinz Peters, an office manager at a notary firm in the German village of Nettetal. His firm had organised an outing and they were booked on a Ryanair flight to Venice. At Weeze airport, Ryanair refused to check him in. The problem? A classic one: the name on his ticket was Heinz but the name in his passport Heinrich.

The flight was booked on Ryanair’s website by one of the firm’s PA’s. And despite the fact that the website explicitly stated that the name of the passenger must be the same as the name in the passport, the young lady just couldn’t imagine that her colleague’s official name was Heinrich. She considered him every bit a Heinz.

At check-in Ryanair showed excellent customer service by offering to change Heinz’s name on the ticket. Heinz was delighted until he was told that Ryanair would like to pocket 150 euro for this service (Heinz was lucky, currently it’s € 160).

Back from the Venice trip Heinz sued Ryanair before the local court. ‘A 150 Euro changing fee is excessive for a 10 euro ticket’, Heinz argued. Before the case was heard, Ryanair acknowledged the claim. The court then ruled that Ryanair was obliged to reimburse Heinz. Not on the basis of substantive law but on the basis of Ryanair’s acknowledgement of the claim.

Ryanair said that the problem had been entirely Heinz’ fault and reimbursement was a sign of the airline’s good will. The high fee served to prevent the resale of cheap tickets. The latter might be a defendable policy in general but in Heinz’ case there was no reason to assume that he abused the system. He, rather the young lady, had just made an error when booking the ticket.

Obviously, Ryanair wanted to prevent a substantive court decision. And they were right because it is beyond doubt that in a case like this the court would have declared Ryanair’s contract term invalid. Under European law (Article 3, Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair terms in consumer contracts) a contract term is unfair if it causes a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations to the detriment of the consumer. The annex to the Directive says that a term may be regarded as unfair when it requires a consumer who fails to fulfil his obligation to pay a disproportionately high sum in compensation (sub e).

Particularly when a passenger mistakenly registers under an incorrect first name or makes a small error in his surname a € 160 is excessive and therefore invalid. This goes for every ticket, regardless of whether it is sold for € 10 or for € 1000. If the contract term is invalid it is not converted into a valid one so in that case the airline is not entitled to charge the passenger anything. It goes without saying that an airline is entitled to charge a reasonable fee for changing the name on the ticket but it is likely that this cannot be more than around € 25.

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