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.