Ryanair fails to inform passengers adequately, Hungarian passenger reports the incident

On 16 July, one of Italy’s busiest airports was closed due to a fire, which also affected Hungarian passengers on a Ryanair flight.

Closed airport in Italy

Catania airport in Italy is currently closed to all flights, with only a minimum number of flights. The airport was first said to open on 19 July, but it is currently not expected to do so until 25 July at the earliest.

Irish low-cost airline Ryanair has left its passengers uninformed. They were not provided with transport to the nearest airport or accommodation. Most of the passengers were told on the spot that they would not be able to get home, writes promotions.hu.

Letter from a Hungarian passenger

“An unhappy ending to a trip to Italy: after a week and a half in Messina, on 17 July 2023, at 9:15 AM, a Ryanair flight to Budapest was due to depart from Catania airport in Sicily, for which I and several friends had tickets.

On 16 July (the day before departure), between 11 PM and midnight, a fire broke out at the airport, which resulted in the closure of the facility until the afternoon of 19 July (Wednesday!). We learned this information by chance on the shuttle to the airport, listening to the radio,” begins a letter from a Hungarian tourist. The passenger finally travelled by train to Rome, from where he returned home on a Wizz Air flight.

“Ryanair did not issue a statement about the incident; it did not provide adequate information in time about the flight changes and possible delays. Subsequently, in a travel Facebook group (!), we learned that some passengers (the lucky ones) received an unofficial information, less than 3 hours before the scheduled departure (!), that the flight finally landed at Trapani airport and took off from there at the same (!) time, 9:15. The beauty of the matter is that the distance between Trapania and Catania is 4 hours by road, so the unofficial information I did not receive arrived so late that it would have been physically impossible to reach the modified flight!!!”

According to the Hungarian passenger, Ryanair has not apologised and not only there is no compensation, there is no refund of the ticket price either.

Ryanair has not yet responded.