Back in July, Times Travel online asked readers whether Ryanair was the least Family Friendly Airline in the sky? Now it seems there is a new rotten-to-families contender: easyJet and its so-called Speedy Boarding "service". A recent reader’s rant on our Your Say pages offered up the experience of Dr Alistair Smith from Stroud flying from Barcelona to Liverpool. He paid £7.50 fee per person to board the plane first with his three young daughters, only to find no preference given to him at all.

Not only was there no call to board first, but also the usual procedure of boarding families with young children after Speedy Boarding was waived as well. Instead, the poor doctor and his family were caught up in the general stampede for the plane, with the family split up and much distress among his daughters.

He wrote more than once to complain, but easyJet would not refund his Speedy Boarding premium (after Travel Online got in touch, to answer Mr Delaney from London’s question, it has consented to do so). One reader asked whether budget airlines were trying to deter families from travelling with them at all.

Before we get on to easyJet’s response, may I just remind the budget airlines, for whom customer service seems to be an irritating afterthought, quite how vulnerable the average family feels when herded into a final departure lounge.

Surrounded by nothing but planes, visible through windows and on the walls, the tribe suddenly clings together sensing danger ahead. Like the drawings that children do, parents view planes as flying tin cans, transporting their precious progeny by a miracle of science that could simply fall out of the sky at any moment.

The lounge becomes a sensory deprivation chamber, the family is unable to leave, has no access to food, water or toilets, and is forced to wait for an unspecified time. This is not the moment to catch up with the newspaper that adult passengers might do, small children sense the air of anxiety and act up. You have already been urged to arrive there early by a misrepresentative “Now Boarding” flashing light, and every minute feels like ten during that final countdown. You are in hell’s waiting room, and all you crave is some flimsy reassurance that you will soon be safely in your seat.

So, how do the budget airlines respond? By adding another charge to the many others, without delivering any guaranteed service at all. Flying back from Ancona with Ryanair this August, I paid the £2 per person priority boarding fee for myself and 6-year-old twins each way, and joined what seemed like a bigger queue than the other (a maximum of 60 priority boarders? Who’s counting?).

Fearful families needing to sit together sweated behind the Priority Boarding post, while the rest of the travellers were free to move around the lounge awaiting a call. It was a degrading experience, and don’t forget that Ryanair used to board families first for free. Now, it seems families are forced to subsidise the rest of the budget-flying public in order to sit together.

To add further insult to injury, even when the families are allowed to board a bus first, this often makes them the last to get off the bus that ferries them to the plane, as Mr Blackburn from Newcastle-upon-Tyne notes on a separate rant. Ignorance from ground staff makes the plight of the family no easier.

Onora from London wrote to us saying that when travelling on easyJet from London to Belfast with a six-month old baby, she was told that she should bring the buggy to the foot of the steps of the aircraft. Going through the gate first, She and other buggy-laden parents were met with two long, steep flights of stairs which required a folded buggy and some help to get down. “It meant that I and other people in the same situation had to wait until other passengers came through to ask for assistance." By the time the kind few stopped to help, lots of others had filed past the families “defeating the whole purpose of priority boarding”.

Issues with buggies seem to be a common problem, and Sam from Sheffield found that a lack of clear policy with Ryanair meant: “Despite being at the front of the queue for boarding and explaining that we wanted to sit together as a family, we were made to wait until last because they didn’t know if they could accommodate the buggy (the check-in desk had told us it would be stored in the cabin). In the end, we had to sit separately.

This also happened on the return flight.” Tracey of Milton Keynes found the manner of the unhelpful staff the worst aspect of flying with Ryanair to Bergerac on her own with a one-year old in a buggy. “The buggy was chucked onto the tarmac at Bergerac breaking the parasol. When we arrived at Stansted on the return journey the Ryanair Staff stood by watching, or should I say smirking, whilst I struggled up the stairs. A passing policeman finally helped me back to the terminal…have since travelled with BA to Bordeaux and Easyjet to Amsterdam on my own with child and both were fine – in fact, Easyjet couldn’t have been more helpful.”

We found that easyJet was at least accessible and open to press enquiries on their procedures. Press Officer Samantha Day did urge families that might be split up to “make more of a fuss!”. “Ask the cabin crew for help. Because we don’t allocate seating, cabin crew are on hand once you have boarded to sort it out, and they can ask passengers to move to keep families together. If the crew are short of time, they can even wait till take off and do it when in the air”.

EasyJet limits Speedy Boarders up to 20, but don’t offer refunds for problems, according to their terms and conditions. Ryanair, on the other hand, who we invited to comment via email and numerous failed attempts to its phoneline, did not respond. However, there are a number of consumer websites such as the Ryanair Campaign which offer support to anyone trying to raise a complaint against the company.

I think my favourite response was offered by a baby on a Ryanair flight when the stewardess refused to warm up his milk “for health and safety reasons”. Writes Sam from Sheffield “We did get our own back when our son was copiously sick on the stewardess”. Out of the mouth of babes.