The worst airline I've ever flown with
I have been travelling annually for over 12 years between Hong Kong, the US and the UK. I have never had an experience as bad as travelling with Aer Lingus this summer.
I have never flown Lingus before and the issues began as far back as when booking our flights. Flying from Philadelphia to Manchester, my wife and I originally wanted to book the flight that transferred in Dublin. However, the website would not let either of us book anything from Hong Kong. In hindsight I realise this was the universe telling us not to bother and I wish I'd listened.
We booked an Air Canada flight, transferring in Toronto but, due to the wildfires, this was rebooked (without our consent) onto the Aer Lingus PHI>DUB>MAN flight. As previously stated, we preferred that flight so were quite happy initially. But little did we know.
The first flight was due to leave on the 18th at 20:25 and get us to Manchester for 11am the next day. However, after boarding late we sat on the runway for hours before being told we had to return to the gate. There were mixed messages as to why this was. The pilot said it was due to weather, other staff mentioned missing a flight window. But the loudest message came from the stewards themselves who, when asked by a number of panicked passengers at risk of missing their connections, responded with a very unhelpful "well you must think of us poor workers too, we also dont know where we're going to stay tonight." On a human level, sure, they're in the same boat as the passengers. However, from a service point of view, that seemed unprofessional and unhelpful in equal measure.
Unprofessional was then what we experienced every step of the next 40 hours as Aer Lingus dropped ball after ball.
After disembarking the plane, staff decided to line people up at the boarding gate to give the same message to each individual group. This was essentially "leave an email address and we'll contact you". Why they couldn't have given that message to everyone at once, who knows. We were told by AL staff there were no hotels available so we went to collect our bags and had to find our own hotel for the night (ending up in Delaware). This was all at 2am, with a 7 year old child. It turns out that there was a hotel put in for some passengers but Im not sure how they found this out.
The next flight (a 'recovery' flight) was put on for the next day at 10pm. This too was delayed boarding, which means many of us were left fearing missing our dublin connections. One poor lass had a panic attack at the gate due to this. To top it off, once we had finally boarded, the stewards had the nerve to ask for a round of applause from passengers for the staff that "helped get us in the air".
My wife had already put in a claim to the customer service at Aer Lingus for the hotel room and that was a terrible experience in itself, but the AL staff at PHI told us this could be done in person when we got to Dublin. When we did arrive in Dublin (yes, we'd missed our connecting flight) they (the AL flight connections desk) told us any compensation claims had to be done online and that AL staff in PHI weren't really AL staff and just "carriers" which had zero relevance to us and seemed like a weak way of passing the buck. The attitudes of the girls on that desk was atrocious too. Arrogant, flippant and more interested in the snacks they had brought in than dealing with customers who were already delayed and being delayed further more.
We finally arrived in Manchester over 40 hours after our due time to find that our bags had not followed us. Global baggage solutions in Manchester told us thay Aer Lingus knowingly put our bags on a later flight due to weight limits, even though this was not mentioned at any time to us.
Our plans were already ruined as we were supposed to be driving straight up to the lake district for a family gathering, but now we had no luggage, no easy address to deliver them to and, even better, had lost our car hire booking that resulted in us having to pay almost 2000GBP (yes, thousand) for a suitable car that would take us where we needed to go.
Aer lingus assured us that the bags would be with us by 8am the next morning. They arrived at about 4pm. We have now entered 3 separate customer service cases for reimbursement of costs and we have still had zero reply.
I can only imagine this company is going out of business soon as they obviously don't have the resources, capacity or decency to operate in a way that is sustainable. We will never fly lingus again, and will tell as many people as possible about our experience
Dato for erfaring: 18 July, 2026
Dato for erfaring: 18 July, 2026