Ryanair row: has digital revolution left elderly behind?

An elderly couple have described how they were left “flustered and upset” after being charged £110 by Ryanair for printing incorrect boarding passes.

Ruth Jaffe, 79, and Peter Jaffe, 80, were forced to pay the fee after they “accidentally downloaded their return boarding passes instead of the outgoing ones for a flight to France”, reported The Guardian. The couple told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme that the airline’s “confusing” website design had led to the error.

Ryanair faced a backlash on social media after the couple’s daughter posted on Twitter about how her parents had been charged £55 each by the airline for new boarding cards following their “honest mistake”. She added: “£110 for 2 pieces of paper which took 1 minute. Shame on you [Ryanair].”

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The airline said the charges were in line with its policy, but the row has shone a spotlight on the predicament of many elderly people struggling to navigate an increasingly digitised and online world.

‘Less likely to use the internet’

Mrs Jaffe told the BBC that “if you’re elderly and you haven’t been brought up using computers from day one, it can be very difficult”.

“I think there’s such a number of people of my generation who will be having problems, that there’s got to be some means of catering for them. Not everybody can go out and buy computers and suddenly become computer savvy,” she said.

And the issue isn’t limited only to travel. The Telegraph reported in May that Marks & Spencer had been accused of “snubbing” its older customers by introducing touchscreens for ordering in its new automated “digital M&S cafes”. And The Express warned earlier this month that older people could be paying more for goods and services “because they are less likely to use the internet”.

More older people becoming tech savvy

But the number of older people who do use technology is growing – in the US at least – according to research from the Pew Research Center. The use of smartphones among people aged 65 and over increased from 13% in 2012 to 61% in 2021, the study found. And the number of older people using technology such as tablets has gone up since 2018, from 38% to 44%.

Yet many older people are being left isolated by an increasingly online world. One possible solution, said Wired, is for countries to follow the lead of New Zealand, which in 2019 published a digital inclusion blueprint. While it’s “still in its early days” the strategy has done much to encourage “marginalised communities to get online, discovering the barriers they face in adopting technology and working to overcome them”.

On this front, however, the UK lags behind. In June, a House of Lords committee criticised the UK government for not publishing a digital inclusion strategy since 2014, and warned that digital exclusion is a key factor in hindering the nation’s ambition to become a “technology superpower.”