Though it may no longer be the “national airline”, Aer Lingus certainly likes to see itself as a cut above rival Ryanair. But is it?
This week, Cantillon’s colleague in Pricewatch, Conor Pope, was fielding two separate complaints about miserable customer service at the airline.
And this is not a one-off. Aer Lingus has featured in Pricewatch 10 times this year – almost once every month – sometimes with multiple reader complaints.
The most infuriating, and recurring, feature is that Aer Lingus can respond to customer complaints and does so quickly, but only once they have been elevated to become a news story.
So it is not that they cannot be sorted directly with passengers who have been discommoded, or think they have been; it is simply that the airline’s customer complaints department is either unable or unwilling to do its job.
The airline may not yet experience the level of complaints that the consumer watchdog, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), gets in relation to Ryanair, but it is not far behind, featuring in the top 10 most complained of organisations over the past couple of years alongside serial offenders such as Eir, Ryanair, Sky, Vodafone, Ticketmaster and retailer Currys and Harvey Norman.
But the issue goes back further than that.
Aer Lingus may not have been perfect in the pre-Covid years, but it rarely performed so poorly that it came to public attention. The global travel shutdown changed all that. The airline’s handling of customers was nothing short of catastrophic, with hundreds of people complaining over how they had been treated.
At that time and since, the airline has said it is learning from experience and updating its approach to improve its service. The truth is that pretty much nothing has changed. If your Aer Lingus booking and flight go smoothly, great. But if there is a hiccup along the way, you run the risk of encountering indifference, incompetence or silence as you try to have your issue addressed.
It is common to hear Aer Lingus passengers cite Ryanair’s take-it-or-leave-it approach to customers among the reasons they choose to fly with the airline even where they pay a premium for the privilege. Increasingly, if the evidence of those complaining to the CCPC or to media is to be believed, that could be money poorly spent.
