There’s some buzz going on this week about Ryanair and it’s not positive imho.
- Yesterday Ryanair made an online PR blunder (or at least some staff did) by it’s unprofessional response to the exposure of a bug on its website by blogger Jason Roe who detected a glitch.
- Today Graham Charlton of E-consultancy has been looking at some other ways that the budget airline can improve user experience on its website and perform better online.
- A better website design
- Take criticism
- Provide a contact number that don’t charge to call
- Don’t distract buyers with 3rd party ads
- Allowing more flexible search options
- Provide alternative suggestions
- Lose the annoying error messages (not permitting to enter invalid departure dates)
Sad but funny to say that Ryanair damm good knows about usability issues, as you can read in last years blogpost by AMAS titled “Ryanair crash lands in online shopping survey“
Some updates below:
- Travolution(23 Feb 2009) What happened when a blogger decided to tak on Ryanair
- Times Online (24 Feb 2009) Ryanair and the ‘idiot bloggers’
- twitter.com/avinashkausik (25 Feb 2009) “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.”
- (25 feb 2009) Ryanair – Their attitude to Online PR part of a Bigger Reputation Problem
Oh btw, take a look at “Ryanair’s 40 favourite headlines” on Times Online
More news tommorow? Or does Ryanair continue digging ?
Ryanair very much has the attitude that if you have a problem with its third-world business practices, you must be stupid. We followed all of their rules for online check-in and accessing boarding passes only to be told that we didn’t have a firm enough grasp of the English language to have done it correctly and therefore they were going to charge us 40 euros. Then they claimed our bags were overweight and charged us 15 euros per kilo. This turned out not to be accurate — at check-in for our Delta flight two hours later in Madrid we learned our bags were only 1 kilo over the limit. Given that even a bankrupt airline such as Delta prefers having customers as opposed to having no customers, pissing them off and treating them like idiots, Delta allowed us to shift out belongings from suitcase to suitcase so as not to be charged extra. We also were charged for two bags we didn’t have and were not allowed priority boarding, for which we had already paid. All in all, it was a disaster, and I will never fly Ryan Air again, nor allow anyone I care about to be their customer. That would include all people who believe in human dignity and decency. On the flight, it was freezing, and even with my daughter’s teeth chattering we were simply told in a cold, dispassionate voice that they had no blankets.