bmibaby quits Manchester Cork route

Tuesday, 16 February 2010 17:15

bmibaby press office confirmed today (16 February 2010) that bmibaby is quitting the Manchester - Cork route AND East Midlands airport  - Cork route. That means no more bmibaby flights to Cork at all.

Bad news in that there will only be one carrier flying Manchester Cork after 11 April 2010 and no more flights from East Midlands airport to Cork after 7 March. Lack of choice is always a bad thing, however when customers exercise their choice, and that's what they have been doing, then the company with poor service gets what it deserves.

The good news is that passengers can no longer be mistreated by ground staff and hassled over the size and weight of their carry-on bags. Neither will passengers be harangued to purchase scratch cards and sky shopping.

In recent months the level of service on the Manchester Cork bmibaby route has deteriorated considerabley. The rot really set in when bmibaby changed their schedules so that the Cork Manchester flight left Cork late in the evening which means that when passengers arrive at Manchester the last train to many destinations has already gone.

This website has published complaints about bmibaby and how difficult they make life when flying, and even more difficult if you want to complain. bmibaby only accepts complaints in writing, posted to its office address. When complaints are received they are usually ignored. When you treat your customers badly they vote with their feet and your business goes down the toilet.

It's sad to see bmibaby quit Cork airport, travel between Ireland and the UK will not be so easy and is likely to increase in cost, but customers have not been served well so bmibaby only has to look to itself for the reason that passengers have gone elsewhere.

bmibaby new website a mess

Tuesday, 05 January 2010 14:21

January 2010 and bmibaby is trumpeting its new website design, the bmibaby marketing email says . . . 'We've just launched our fantastic new website! There are loads of great features, . . .'

The new site looks and operates as though it was put together by a bunch of amateurs and operates at a speed that would disappoint a snail. Images appear over several seconds.

For reasons best know to themselves the designers of the new bmibaby website have changed the way that the from and to airports are selected, which means that the list is now to large to fit many screens. bmibaby has also changed the way outward and return dates are selected, adding confusion and extra un-necessary mouse clicks. You could be forgiven for thinking that bmibaby wants to make life difficult for prospective passengers.

If you do manage to enter flight details then click 'show flights' you are presented with a waiting screen

When the new website was tested (Jan 5, 2010) this screen was visible for several minutes despite the submit button being clicked, and finally produced an error message . . .

'Invalid access to memory location' means there is something wrong at bmibaby. On another occasion a 'page not found' error was produced.

After 20 minutes the flight enquiry was abandoned, so much for the 'fantastic new website' - the old website worked, this one does not.

Ryanair cuts Standstead flights

Tuesday, 21 July 2009 12:56

For once Listen to the People dot com agrees with Micheal O'Leary who said . . .

"Ryanair's 40% capacity cutback at London Stansted shows just how much Gordon Brown's £10 tourist tax and the BAA monopoly's high airport charges are damaging London and UK tourism and the British economy generally"

BAA would do well to recall that Ryanair deserted Blackpool airport because this small regional airport introduced a £10 per passenger 'airport development charge'. After intensive negotiations Blackpool Airport insisted on introducing the charge, so Ryanair stopped using the airport.

There are two major losers, Blackpool Airport - who will lose out because Ryanair is no longer using that airport, and every other passenger who flies through Blackpool because they are getting charged £10 and getting nothing in return.

Every time we take a short flight Gordon Brown's government rips up off to the tune of £10 in 'passenger tax' and that's going up to £11 in November.

In addition they rip us of with security charges and pile on the airport charges. As we have said on many occasions BAA should be broken up immediately and slots at airports should not be owned by airlines.

bmibaby finds yet another way to charge passengers

Friday, 17 July 2009 14:52

Just when you thought it was safe to come out . . .

bmibaby has found yet another way to charge you, this time they are taking advantage of more government snooping and spying that comes in the form of APIS, nothing to do with bees, and not something that boys do behind the bike sheds!

Advance Passenger Information System - another idea dreamed up by the control freaks at Nu Labour to keeps tabs on the innocent general public. More information hoarded away in a secret database to be scanned and searched by the faceless beaurcrats whose inflated salaries and gold-plated pensions we all have to pay.

At some unspecified time the government is going to require airlines to supply passport numbers and lots of other details of passengers to the database before and UK or international flight.

What an opportunity for the likes of bmibaby! Not to miss any chance to extract and extra few quid from the travelling public bmibaby is now emailing passengers telling them that if they don't go to the bmibaby website and add this information to their bookings then they will be charged £5 per flight for entering the data.

In their usual helpful way bmibaby have made this as awkward as possible and don't provide any feedback that the information has in fact been entered so passengers are left in limbo not knowing whether or not they got it right.

bmibaby could never be accused of making their website easy to use.