Whatever the word is for the opposite of heartwarming, it certainly applies to the story of Ruth and Peter Jaffe. The elderly couple from Ealing, west London, made headlines last week after being charged £110 by Ryanair for printing out their tickets at Stansted airport.
Even allowing for the exorbitant cost of inkjet printer ink, 55 quid for each sheet of paper is a shockingly creative example of punitive pricing.
The Jaffes, aged 79 and 80, said they had become confused on the Ryanair website and accidentally printed out their return tickets instead of their outbound ones to Bergerac. It was the kind of error anyone could make, although octogenarians, many of whom struggle with the tech demands of digitalisation, are far more likely to make it.
But as the company explained in a characteristically charmless justification of the charge: “We regret that these passengers ignored their email reminder and failed to check-in online.”
Leaving aside the “sorry, not sorry” expression of regret, the presumption is that the elderly remain vigilant to every missive from the online world, when in fact many find it a jungle of scams, junk mail, endless passwords and security risks into which they venture as little as possible.
Although Ryanair prides itself on its distinctively narrow interpretation of customer care, the plight of the Jaffes is emblematic of a larger problem confronting the elderly and those not fully plugged into modern systems of business.
Citing the Jaffes, the historian and TV presenter Amanda Vickery noted in a series of outraged tweets last week that “most car parks now don’t take cash, ticket offices are disappearing. If you are not tech-savvy you are toast. It is so exclusionary.”
The real cause of Vickery’s ire, however, was a breast cancer clinic she attended that, in her words, turned away “some old ladies … because they did not have an SMS message from an app. They didn’t even have a phone! Appalling. And agist!”
The Good Things Foundation is the UK’s largest digital inclusion charity, seeking to help a million people to get across a tech divide that has deepened during the cost of living crisis. Natasha Bright-Wray, the foundation’s associate director of communications, says that “digitally excluded people are largely forgotten” by a government that boasts of making the UK a digital superpower but is apathetic about those left behind and lacks any meaningful digital inclusion strategy.
The effects are conspicuous in the NHS, where improved digitalisation can bring greater efficiencies but often leaves those, like the women Vickery witnessed, failing to benefit from the services.
After all, as Bright-Wray says, one in 20 UK households have no home internet access. And in the case of
