Dear Michael O'Leary,

I am not happy!

I have to fly from the UK to Ireland every week at the moment. In order to minimise the cost of this inconvenience, I am using a well know Irish low fare company: it is cheap, and they have planes.

I have been flying back and forth between the UK and Ireland for the last 3 months or so, and for the major part of using this company, I have been satisfied (ok, they are late from time to time, but hey, even if you pay more with another company, they also are late from time to time).

Because I have been flying the same regular flights for so long, I did not notice 2 weeks ago that the departure time from the UK had been brought forwards by 30 minutes: on that day, I ended up missing the chek in and therefore missing my flight (they would not let me on board with 2 bags...). The nice lady at the desk told me that I had missed the check in by 6 minutes, and I could take the next flight (the next day!!) or fly somewhere else to Ireland and then drive (there was a flight 2 hours later to this destination). I chose the second option 'cause I had to be at work the next morning: that costed me 4 times more than the cost of a typical one way ticket. I ended up having to pay £165 for 6 minutes >> That's crap.

Yesterday, I am on my weekly commute, and arrive well in advance so as not to miss the check in by 6 minutes again. All seems ok, we get on the plane on time and I get ready to doze off for a little hour before touch down. I wake up in a start about 45 minutes later at the sound of the captain explaining why we have not moved.

"There is a problem on the aircraft and the engineer has been notified. He will be here blabla..." Another 45 minutes later, they make us disembark the plane and go back in the airport: the engineer says we need a spare part: somebody will have to go get it and it will take blabla...

Two things here that really pissed me off:

• what pissed me off - 1: we were on the plane for about 2 hours. Personally I was fine, I had some water and a good book (and I slept for half of that time anyway). But there were babies and young children stuck in there with their parents not really having planned for more than 1 hour flight in terms of drinks and food. Do you know what the crew did for these people and children? NOTHING. They did nothing at all: they retracted behind their blue curtain on the plane and waited for the captain to talk to us.
• what pissed me off - 2: we ended up taking off at 10:30 pm (the original time was 3:20 pm). That's nearly 7 hours delay!!! I had a chat with a group of 4 people who were taking 3 days to visit Ireland and they were going to loose the end of an afternoon there, an evening there, and an early morning there.

What will this company offer to these people in return for that? Nothing.

Michael, your company charged me £165 for 6 minutes delay, I now expect £11550.00 compensation from you... or just a free drink on board when that happens again.