Stupid airline fees.
Or, stupid you for paying them?
According to the CEO of a popular no-frills airline, passengers shouldn’t complain about having to fork over fees for certain services because in most cases the payment could be avoided if they weren’t so “stupid.”
Last month, the outspoken CEO of European discount carrier Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, called a female passenger “stupid” after she took to social media complaining about a hefty fee charge.
In August, Suzy McLeod of Berkshire, England, was charged 300 euro (roughly $400) for failing to print her family’s boarding passes prior to their flight from Alicante, Spain, to Bristol, England. Ryanair charged McLeod 60 euro each to re-issue boarding passes at the airport for her and her four family members.
Irate at having to dig deep to cover the steep fee, McLeod went off on the airline’s Facebook page and in the process garnered “likes” from more than half a million Facebook users.
Not surprisingly, Ryanair’s CEO was not among McLeod’s supporters. Rather, O’Leary struck back by going public with this retort: “We think Mrs. McLeod should pay 60 euros for being so stupid. She wasn’t able to print her boarding card because, as you know, there are no internet cafes in Alicante, no hotels where they could print them out for you, and you couldn’t get to a fax machine so some friend at home can print them and fax them to you.”
O’Leary went on to tell UK’s Daily Telegraph that 99.98 per cent of Ryanair passengers print their boarding passes in advance. “To those who don’t, we say quite politely: ‘B***** off.’”
This is not the first time Ryanair has made headlines in regards to its policies and fees. The discount carrier garnered international attention after it announced that it was considering charging passengers a fee to use the plane’s restrooms.
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