When I first read this story earlier during the week I thought it was a joke, but apparently it’s not..
Ryanair is shutting down their website from tonight at 2200 until 2200 tomorrow night.
Nobody will be able to book flights for a 24 hour period – the “shop” will be offline
Here’s their official announcement:
18/19 May – Ryanair.com 24 Hour Closure
The www.ryanair.com website will be closed for upgrade maintenance at the below times between Fri. 18 May and Sun. 20 May. Passengers must ensure that they have booked tickets, checked in online and printed their boarding passes etc. prior to the below times.
1. Bookings cannot be made on Ryanair.com from 22:00 hrs on Fri. 18 May until 22:00hrs Sat. 19 May
2. Online Check-in – Not available from 16:00 hrs on Fri. 18 May until 12:00 hrs. Sun. 20 May
3. Flight Changes cannot be made from 22:00 hrs on Fri. 18 May until 22:00hrs Sat. 19 May
Ryanair wishes to apologise to all passengers who may be affected by our website closure which is unavoidable in order to upgrade the www.ryanair.com website.
Why would anyone take an online business offline for a full 24 hours? We’re obviously not privy to all the technical details, but it strikes me as a little odd.
And to add insult to injury the budget airline will continue to levy their “standard” fees ie. penalties on passengers who do not have printed boarding passes and who have not completed the online check-in!
Related articles
- Ryanair shuts website but demands online check-in (independent.co.uk)
- Ryanair website goes offline, but will still charge passengers who haven’t printed boarding passes (dailymail.co.uk)
About the Author: Michele Neylon
I would be interested to know why they went offline for a full 24 hours, however as someone who had to go to London on Friday with them, I received their advance email warnings. The initial warning reversed points 1 and 2 and included the following text. “Passengers travelling between these dates and times who are unable to check-in online can check-in at the airport and will not be charged the airport the airport check-in fee”. From the flight it would appear that the one item of hand luggage per passenger has been lifted, a gentleman sitting two rows ahead of me carried on several items of hand luggage which exceeded the limits at the gate
May of had something to do with the way they set their website “cookies”. https://twitter.com/#!/aral/status/204866476723814401/photo/1
It’s amazing that no one seems to realize (althought the information is available online) that bookings (and are checkins) are outsourced. So this was, most probably, an outage imposed on Ryanair by the vendor.