Ryanair is causing business travellers uncertainty after it was announced they could be cancelling up to 2,000 flights, with up to 285,000 passengers potentially being affected.
The budget airline is cancelling approximately 55 flights each day this week to solve a backlog of annual leave entitlement for Ryanair staff, including pilots, despite earlier claiming the disruption was to “improve punctuality”.
Twitter user Irene told EW's sister title CN that she is due to travel to a conference in Prague on Thursday, but is unsure whether her outgoing and incoming flights will be affected.
Talking to the BBC, Jacobs said: “We have messed up in the planning of pilot holidays and we’re working hard to fix that,” he said.
“Most of the cancellations are due to a backlog of staff leave which has seen large numbers of the airline’s staff book holidays towards the end of the year.
The airline is changing its holiday year, which currently runs from April to March, to run from January to December instead.
Rynanair said the shift meant it had to allocate annual leave to pilots in September and October.
However, Ryanair’s Robin Kiely said on the airline’s website that the cancellations were aimed to “improve punctuality”. He said: “We have operated a record schedule (and traffic numbers) during the peak summer months but must now allocate annual leave to pilots and cabin crew in September and October. This increased leave at a time of ATC capacity delays and strikes, has severely reduced our on-time performance over the past two weeks to under 80 per cent.
“By cancelling less than 2 per cent of our flying programme over the next six weeks, (until our winter schedule starts in early November) we can improve the operational resilience of our schedules and restore punctuality to our annualised target of 90 per cent.
“We apologise sincerely to the small number of customers affected by these cancellations, and will be doing our utmost to arrange alternative flights and/or full refunds for them.”
A full list of affected flights this week can be found here.
