Swedes left stranded as Ryanair flight goes empty

A Swedish family is outraged after being told to find their own way home from Croatia when their Ryanair flight was cancelled, despite the fact that it still flew back to Sweden without any passengers.

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The members of the Axelsson family from Nyköping, eastern Sweden, are livid with Ryanair after they were forced to find their own way home following a holiday in Rijeka, northern Croatia.

“I never thought they would behave this badly,” Mirva Axelsson told the Aftonbladet newspaper.

“We knew we were travelling with a budget airline but we never thought they’d leave us behind.”

Ryanair announced to passengers Friday that the wind was simply too strong to safely make the flight from Rijeka to Skavsta airport outside of Stockholm.

However, just two hours later the plane took off anyway – without any passengers on board.

Mirva, her husband, and their two children had no other choice but to make other arrangements, along with all the other passengers – a task that proved difficult as there was no internet available in the airport.

The Axelssons ended up taking a taxi from Rijeka across Slovenia and into Trieste in Italy.

From there, they took a train to Traviso where they stayed the night, flying the next morning to Sweden.

The whole affair cost the family around 8,000 kronor ($1,220) – money they are now trying to reclaim.

However, the family has had no success with even reaching the airline, and fear that they won't see the money again.

According to the Swedish Consumer Agency (Konsumentverket), an airline is wrong to leave passengers to fend for themselves.

“One has the right to help with transfers and rebooking, and if it comes to this kind of time span you have also the right to food and housing,” said agency spokesperson Jolanda Girzl to the paper.

The news come shortly after the Irish Independent newspaper detailed how Ryainair planes had sought 28 emergency landings citing fuel shortages – a result of their cost cutting approach to loading their planes with the minimal possible amount of fuel pre-flight.

TT/The Local/og
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