Flight Experience with Ryanair

Remember those happy faces we’ve posted from the airport before leaving Bucharest? Well, forget about them. After that all hell broke loose.

We went to the boarding gate of our Ryanair flight. There were lots of people and a not so welcoming lady from the flight company who was commenting on what luggage people had. For example when we got in front her reaction that went with a sour face was “ah, look, a baby carriage”. As if she was suppose to carry the luggage herself to Athens.

Anyhow, she said there is no place on the plane for luggage and I cannot travel with it inside the aircraft so she took it. It’s not the first time they take the luggage because they have no space and they return it at the stairs of the plane, along with the carriage. So I wasn’t worried. 

I started getting though when I got off the airplane and only saw the carriage. I asked one of the handlers and he said they’ve sent them all to luggage claim area. We had another flight in an hour so time was short. I figured I could talk to them at the gate and they would put my luggage in this plane particularly since my luggage was a cabin luggage and it shouldn’t have ended up in the luggage claim area in the first place. I took Andreas-Rares and went to the other end of the airport where the gate of our next flight was. After queues, security checks, passport control I finally get to the gate and expressed my problem to one of the ladies there. 

She looked blank at me and she told me that there is nothing she can do. I should have taken my luggage and she kept insisting that Ryanair is a “point to point” company. By then I really started getting agitated. I’ve been on the road for 12h already and my nerves were not in the best of shape. With the last calm breath I had I asked her what exactly does “point to point mean” and she told me, with an increasingly risen voice, that I should have read the Terms and Conditions form the Ryanair site when I bought the tickets. That everything is clearly written there, Ryanair doesn’t deliver luggage to destination if you have more than one flight. You need to go pick it up and go to your next flight.  

“Ok, but that was my CABIN luggage that you people misplaced! What am I suppose to do now? “

“Talk to Ryan Air!”

“But YOU ARE Ryanair!” 

She continued yelling, telling me that I should have read the Terms and Conditions on the site, that it’s not their fault and that I should have brought my luggage with me.

Back to the real world, the choices I had were two and I didn't like any: either lose the plane and get the luggage or lose the luggage (with probably no chance of getting it back considering the level of professionalism I’ve encountered) and take the plane. 

I had Andreas-Rares medication from the medical trial in the luggage so choosing the plane was not really an option. 

At 10PM last night I was in the Athens airport, tired, with no other flight going to Thessaloniki that day, with a tired, hungry and already scared baby and with no one to turn to for help in the city. I broke down and cried. I just needed to let it out. Andreas-Rares looked at me and he started laughing. I must have been a very amusing site. Somehow that laugh got me back on my feet. 

I went and reclaimed the luggage, called my husband who found a buss leaving from to Thessaloniki in the next hour. Took a cab, went to the bus station and everything seemed to get back in track.

Everything was ok until we got into the buss and it started moving. Andreas-Rares has never been in a bus before. He traveled by car, plane, train but never by bus so the sounds the bus is making were totally unknown to him. He jumped up terrified 5 minutes after the bus had left and I couldn’t calm his screams for more than two hours. He was exhausted and so was I. He finally managed to fall asleep in my arms. That is the second time in his life he did that. The first one was when we ended up in the ER this summer with that bad case of vomiting. 

We got to Thessaloniki at 6AM after a total of 20 hours of travel. After this experience, one thing is for sure, Ryanair is not a flight company I want to fly again with.