No Ryanair, Me Speak English

So, a little over a year ago (doesn’t time fly?) Jason Roe posted a piece on his blog about a bug in the Ryanair flight booking system. In case you missed the post, you can read it here. Now although it’s obviously not a great user experience if your customers click a few links and ends up seeing the price as £0.00 during the order process, really it was a post about fundamentally nothing.

What made this post considerably more interesting, was the fact someone from the Ryanair development team decided to come and post retaliatory comments, such as:

jason!
you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!
you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it!

Marvelous stuff. Cue lots of links, mass hysteria and Ryanair issuing a statement about how they don’t correspond with Idiot Bloggers.

So, fast forward a year and you’d think Ryanair would now be a bit more careful about making technical mistakes, given the free-speaking nature of their staff. Well, apparently not as I discovered when their latest email promotion dropped in my inbox last Wednesday.

Just to clarify my own experience with Ryanair, I have flown with them in the past, although not for a few years. I have always used their English site, I have always had an English IP, My billing address has always been in England, and my email address with them has always been a .co.uk. OK, so there’s plenty of indicators there for them that I’m English, right?

So imagine my surprise when I received this lovely email:

Oh yes, they’ve somehow come to the conclusion that I now speak Polish! Ooops. You can imagine the kind of duff email list extraction code that was behind sending me this, but just as a free hint for any developers reading:

Now, companies do sometimes send emails to the wrong mailing lists by mistake; although in my opinion you should have sufficient checks in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. But seriously, sending emails to customers who probably don’t even speak the language it’s written in? Not good. And did they send a follow up email apologising for the mistake? Of course not, this is Ryanair so it must somehow be my fault

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