Dawn Paisley Mills, from Toxteth, believed that she had been charged £115 for €7 bottle of prosecco on a Ryanair flight and spent 18 months trying to get a refund

A Ryanair passenger thought she had been charged £115 for a €7 bottle of prosecco on a flight to Portugal and spent 18 months trying to get a refund before realising she had made a mistake.

Dawn Paisley Mills, a mum-of-five from Toxteth, bought a bottle of Mionetto Prosecco on a Ryanair flight from Liverpool to Faro on July 1, 2020, and was shocked when she read what she thought was the price.

She said the bottle, a gift for her boyfriend, should have cost €7, but when she returned from her flight she noticed a charge of £115 from Ryanair on her bank statement, reported the Liverpool Echo.

Dawn spent the next 18 months sending numerous complaints and requests for a refund to Ryanair – but it turned out the £115 was the cost for her return flight to Manchester six days later and not the bottle of prosecco.

“I don’t usually buy anything on flights but a couple sitting next to me had bought the bottle and it was quite pretty and it was tiny,” said Dawn.

“So I called them over so I could buy it as a present for my boyfriend. I didn’t think anything of it. I wanted to pay with cash but they said they were only taking cards, so I put my card in and paid.

“I filmed myself with the bottle of wine to put on Facebook to let my friends know that I was on the flight. I was saying ‘look, I’ve bought this wine as a gift’.

“I got home five days later and went into my bank account and saw I had been charged £115. I was asking my bank to get the money back and they were telling me to give them all the evidence, so I sent them all the paperwork, the pictures of me.

“My bank asked if I had a receipt, but at some point I cleared my bag out – you’re not going to keep a receipt you think is for €7.”

Dawn said she made many attempts to get a refund, but struggled to get any response from Ryanair’s automated customer service system.

She said: “When you phone them, you don’t speak to people. They’re all automated calls and every time you ring through, this call puts you onto another automated voice which brings you back to the beginning, so you don’t get to speak to anybody.

“Then they tell you to go online and when you go online, they’ve got these ‘chatbots’. You’re talking to these chatbots, trying to tell them what’s happened and then the chatbot says ‘we’ve not got enough information’ and then it cuts you off.”

It wasn’t until last Wednesday, January 6, that she actually found the truth about what had happened.

Dawn explained the payment for the bottle of wine had not shown up on her bank statement, which led to her confusion – and it likely means she got the bottle for free, as the card machines on the flight had been faulty.