Ryanair: Irish writer says she is getting her laptop back

AN IRISH writer who said she was told to travel to Romania to retrieve a laptop lost at a London airport says she expects to get her computer back tomorrow.

According to Susan Connolly, who lost her device at Stansted, budget airline Ryanair had insisted that she or a nominated friend pick it up in Romania’s capital city Bucharest.

The writer has been without her laptop, which has drafts of novels and scripts on, for three months.

But now she says she's been in contact with the company and will be picking up the computer tomorrow after members of the public in Romania offered to bring it back.

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In a statement to The Irish News the airline said that their customer service team "has no record of customer in question, and his since resolved the matter."

“Ryanair does not accept any liability for customers' hand baggage, as it is each individual customer’s responsibility to ensure that they carry all of their belongings with them when leaving the airport or aircraft," Ryanair said.

"The Lost Property Office in the relevant airport may be able to assist with locating misplaced hand luggage".

The laptop was misplaced when Susan got a plane from Dublin to London on April 25 this year. As she was sat in the emergency exit row, she had to put her laptop in an overhead locker, where she later left it.

The 31-year-old realised her mistake just as the doors on the shuttle bus were closing to take passengers from the plane to the airport.

Around 20 minutes after the plane landed, Susan was at the Ryanair check in desk to ask if it could be found.

“They said they had already checked the plane and there was no way to recheck it,” she said.

The laptop wasn’t found on the plane, the grounds staff didn’t have it, and Susan thought it had been stolen.

“I went and changed all my passwords and then the next day I called the lost property service again and they didn’t have it. Then I got an email from Romania saying they had found my laptop, because the plane I had got from Dublin to London had then gone on to Romania.”

Susan continued: “I was delighted because I thought this would be an easy fix – I thought I would probably have to pay something to get my laptop back but I thought it would be fine.

“Bucharest Airport said they could send it back via a Ryanair plane to Stansted but I would have to give notice that I understood it might get damaged.”

Susan said that was fine, and gave them her full permission to send the laptop back to London.

But three months later, and Susan’s laptop was still in Romania.

When Susan called Bucharest again, they told her Ryanair was refusing to allow them to put the laptop on a plane, or post it to her.

“The only option I had was either to fly there myself or to make a friend in Bucharest who I can nominate go and pick up my laptop, which to me seems ridiculous.

“They know where it is, they know it’s mine, I don’t understand why they can’t arrange for me to get it back.”

Ryanair’s website says a return flight between Stansted and Bucharest would cost her £269.98, with more than 10 hours spent waiting at the airport.

Susan took to Twitter to get the attention of Ryanair but she claimed the only information she had been able to get was from Bucharest lost and found.

Her friends also tried talking to Ryanair in a bid to get them to respond.

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Susan lives in Cambridge and is from Dublin.

She returns home around once a month and says it’s the first time she has faced a problem from the budget airline.

“I think what is most frustrating about it is you hear all this stuff about Ryanair and how they’re horrible to fly on, but I actually quite like flying on Ryanair.”

“This is first time I’ve come up with that inflexible bureaucracy that they have.”