RyanAir EU261 Compensation
Making an EU261 Compensation Claim with RyanAir?
Clearly RyanAir has designed the most the convoluted and complicated process for claiming for flight cancellation or delays under the EU261 compensation process.
It’s so clearly designed to throw as many obstacles up as possible in the hope that people would give up.
It also points out that if anything is wrong in the submission, it could cause ‘lengthy’ delays in processing the refund. All of which is perfectly legal, but somewhat unfair.
First of all it checks the name against the booking reference and won’t let you proceed unless it is an exact match. That’s a smart idea, but there was a problem as there was a space between the two parts of the given name on the boarding pass but on the form they had to be run together.
One major obstacle is the error message below…
Invalid payment details!
Check your IBAN/SWIFT (BIC) details and try again
Your IBAN or Swift number is normally found on your bank statement – see the sample image below
However the Ryan Air online form will deliberately continue to give errors.
I found the solution to this to use an online IBAN calculator
https://www.ibancalculator.com/
Entering in your account number and sort code gives a different IBAN number to that sometimes provided by banks e.g. for First Direct it replaced the HBUKGB41FDD with HBUKGB41XXX
Clearly some software testing or even deliberate “defects” in the RyanAir online form!