Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 28 July 2020

Special Committee on Covid-19 Response

Covid-19: Impact on Aviation (resumed)

Mr. Eddie Wilson:

If the Deputy looks at the scale of this, for example, if he looks at April, one of the three months involved, we would have a budget for 14 million passengers to fly that month. We ended up flying 40,000. If one multiplies those three months and divides down the amount of people on different bookings, one comes up with in excess of 20 million passengers or individual refunds to deal with. Of course, there will be difficulties with that in terms of backlogs. We are not unique in that. The good news is that all our people have been back to work since 1 June. We have hired extra people in call centres to deal with this. We have processed in excess of €750 million. Some 90% of the people who are in the cash refund queue will be processed by the end of this month, which is in two days' time. There will be an ongoing process whereby people who have vouchers, change their minds and do not want to use them can simply go on the website or our chatbot and change them into cash. That amount is sitting there in terms of a liability for Ryanair and it is a question of the customers who want cash, vouchers or flight changes. They are being facilitated. Sometimes the volume of what we are dealing with is huge. Our people are doing a fantastic job-----

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