Scummy Ryanair Tricks
After announcing worse-than-expected figures due to high fuel prices etc. Ryanair seem to be looking at ways to squeeze more money out of it’s passengers – and now they’ve hit on cancelling all bookings made through 3rd party websites, like lastminute.com, and forcing passangers to rebook using Ryanair.com directly.
Supposedly an anti-screen-scraping tactic – the Irish Indo quotes O’Leary as saying “We want to cause as much chaos for the [websites] as possible” – but as far as most people are concerneed (the consumer association too) this is just typical Ryanair squeezing every last cent from passengers, who will now have to re-book their flights at the last minute.
Unlikely? Well don’t forget that time that Ryanair rescheduled a flight to the UK on all those Munster rugby fans, and then once most had cancelled their tickets, re-instated it?
The real issue that Ryanair have with 3rd party sites is that the Ryanair site is loaded with extra services – car hire, hotels, etc. etc. and the 3rd party sites probably don’t buy unneccesary insurance products etc. so Ryanair probably feel that they’re losing out on a lot of money.
Sean\'s Sicily 
Thank you for the submission to Techdirt. I envy you the Italian. It turns out there are limits on directions of knowledge, or something. Italian? philosophy?…the hell with it, I should have stayed in the Philippines and gone to the jungles.
–Glenn
(Anyway, again, thanks for the interesting tip.)
oregonnerd
August 9, 2008 at 11:58 am
I think Ryanair are perfectly right to do what they plan – one example of these screen scraping sites is http://www.bravofly.com- if you visit the website and go through the motions of booking a flight you will see how they operate. They don’t use the customers email address when booking the flight with Ryanair so the airline has no ability to contact the customer in the event of a flight change/cancelation etc. I might understand if bravofly and others had an agreement in place but to do what they are doing without permission is just plain wrong.
IrishFlightNews
August 9, 2008 at 5:06 pm
First of all, I don’t think Ryanair are being honest about why they are against screen-scraping. It is about maximising the revenues through the website – not only the car-hire and hotels, but also the income from all those people who inadvertently buy the default insurance, priority-booking, etc. without meaning to.
Neither is this just about screen-scraping – if Ryanair was really so hot and bothered about it, they’d just introduce a catch-pa to stop it, and announce a change in policy that any flights booked after a certain date via 3rd parties would not be honoured.
Instead, what they’ve done is inconvenience a lot of people (1,000 people a day were the sales figures getting mentioned) for maximum publicity – largely, as far as I can see, to get the bad news out of the papers (especially as the bad news is about O’Leary’s cock-up regarding oil futures).
seancasaidhe
August 11, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Hey I got referenced from Techdirt – cool. 🙂
seancasaidhe
August 11, 2008 at 1:32 pm