back to article Ryanair cancels aggregator-booked tickets in escalating scraping war

Ryanair has said that it will no longer honour bookings made through aggregator sites. The Irish budget airline said that cancelling would be quicker and more effective than lawsuits. Ryanair recently sued aggregation company Bravofly in the Irish courts, claiming that its 'screen-scraping', or automatic collection of …

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  1. Mark
    Stop

    re: Screen scraping

    "and that they remove the oportunity to cross-sell (very important for a low-margin business such as air travel)"

    And why is it my fault that their business model depends on me doing something they want? Are they paying me to go to their site? No? So nuts to them.

    I'm certain that if Ryanair needed cheap labour, they'd go to some other country for it and hang it that, to be a viable country, we need employment here in the UK. And they'd get away with it too! Why? Because they are looking to make the most money. Well, I'm looking to spend the least money.

    The tension between the two needs is what a competitive (free) market is all about!

  2. Rob Briggs
    Flame

    RyanAir are just a bunch of wankers

    Left me stranded twice, missed a wedding at which I was to be an usher. It's not that delays or cancellations happen, it's their "Fuck you!" attitude that comes with it.

    Also a significant number of safety-related lapses in the last couple of years (missed and low approaches mainly, allegedly caused by poor cockpit resource management) - see Flight International for details of CAA and IAA reports.

    Would I fly with them again? Not in a month of Sundays and I positively evangelise to all I meet that they do not fly with them also.

    And Michael O'Leary is a tosser

  3. Padraig
    Thumb Down

    Too Bad Man

    We never use Ryanair because we don't like the attitude of its owner. Breach of contract and a major EU case seems obvious. In our law, they confirmed a contract from the moment they took the money (the ticket issue merely confirms the contract). We need the equivalent of a major US class action on this one.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    re: re: Those who complain about Ryanair

    They key point is that the end consumer does not have a contract with Ryanair: the aggregator does and they have breached the T&Cs. So you can go to the aggregator and ask them to fly you to wherever; Ryanair don't have to do anything for you.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Finally people are realizing that low-cost isn't low at all!

    There, Finally I can read others saying exactly what I have been telling everyone for the past 2 years: fly with everone but the low-costs. They aren't low cost at all. Unless you are really really fortunate and get a 1penny tickets (plus taxes) you are bound to pay just as much as any regular airline.

    And what you get for low cost? risk, risk, and risk. Plus you have to fight for a seat.

    Now, I may pay maybe £20 more for a regular airline, travel to a "normal" airport with "normal" services, get to choose the seat 24 hours before flying, thank you to web checkins, and the only thing I have to deal with is security at the airport.

    Drop the low -cost: they aren't worth it.

  6. heystoopid
    Joke

    Or

    Or could it be due to the high jet fuel prices our friends at "ryan seat of the pants" is about to do the usual "Continental Airlines" well known cut and run a chapter 11 when the cash flow runs low !

  7. William Wallace

    Re: Or

    They've got 2.4 billion euros cash in the bank. They carry almost twice the passengers that BA carries, they are capitalised at almost twice BA's value. They'll be around for quite some time yet.

    They are a flying bus service - and they do it well.

  8. Adrian Esdaile
    Thumb Down

    I wish we had something as good as Ryanair...

    All we have down here is Jetstar (Deathstar) and Qantas. Oh, and Qantas owns Jetstar.

    We could do with some compeition, quite frankly. Thanks to the monopoly, I can get a business trip to North QLD (2 hour flight) for TWICE the price of a flight to Osaka (10 hours, and nicer city). Now I don't think thats "fuel prices" the old chestnut they claim, as it clearly uses about 5 times the fuel to get to the other side of the frikkin planet.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Screenscraping the Screenscrapers

    For a recent complex trip involving 5 european flights and lots of flexibility, I screenscraped skyscanner into a spreadsheet, but to get realistic comparisons had to add about e20 to prices from RyanAir.

    I still ended up using them twice, without problem (of course, I booked direct on their own delightful website)

  10. fixit_f
    Happy

    I think they're within their rights here - and they're doing intelligent people a favour

    For example - a trip to Dublin from London Gatwick/Stansted is cheapest with Dan Dare. None of the old school established airlines can compete with their prices providing you carry your stuff as hand luggage and don't buy food or anything else while you're in the air. Read and interpret everything on their website as you book, and de-select all the things they try to flog you that you don't need. Same principle with Sleazyjet. During the flight you will be subjected to constant advertising by the cabin crew for "stuff" and their websites default all kinds of extras that you don't need at the point of booking. So what, leave your headphones in and if the ropey stewardesses try to bother you don't buy anything, Christ they even try to sell you their own brand of scratch cards. However, ignore/deselect all of this stuff on the webshite and you get amazingly cheap flights, it's not rocket science. It's an opportunity for smart people to fly for basically f**k all and if the chavs want to fall for their tricks, well, that's a tax on stupid chavs and is to be encouraged because they're paying for the rest of us, the silly anti-Darwinian chav people. On a short haul flight you get a good price, ok the webshite might leave you feeling a little dirty, but so what - you're an informed traveller booking cheap flights with no extras. Use your brain. Dan Dare, Sleazyjet and Air Fungus are all examples of ways that people (like informed register readers) can get easy flights on the back of profits paid by Jeremy Kyle viewers. Let the chavs give something back by subsidising cheap flights by paying for horrible inflight meals, inflated duty free products and airline-specific scratch cards . It's about time us normal 40% tax paying people had something back off them.

    That might have sounded a bit Daily Mail, can I assure everyone that I'm actually a Guardian reader. However my last Dan Dare flight was full of scum kicking the back of my seat and polluting the already thin air with their minimum wage humour, so I'm slightly jaded by the experience...... I'm not alone, surely?

  11. Steve

    Time for a lesson

    However legally right or otherwise Ryanair may be in this, O'Leary has really shot himself in the foot with this one. Once a few people get turned away at the airport, or kindly offered the chance to re-purchases their cheap tickets for £300 a throw, this is going to backfire. The punters won't blame the resellers, or themselves. As far as they're concerned it will be Ryanair who turned them away, and Ryanair whose fault it is, and that's what they'll tell their friends.

    There are many halfway-decent low-cost airlines like Easyjet. Ryanair isn't low-cost, it's cheap. O'Leary is about to learn the difference.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    IT Angle

    Fly with a proper airline

    I recently flew to Geneva on a proper airline, the total ticket cost £15 more than with Ryan air. For my £15 I got a smile, a check in que of 3 people, a 23Kg hold luggage allowance instead of 15Kg and 2 pieces of hand luggage. To top it off the plane we flew on had full leather seats and more than enough leg room for my 6ft tall wife.

    Worth every penny, a relaxing and comfortable flight, unlike my last experience with Ryan air.

    I don't dislike all cheap operators, easy jet are worth it when the flights are really cheap.

  13. David Chappell
    Happy

    common sense

    Why fly cheap when you can fly comfy.

  14. Saul Dobney

    Pluses and minuses

    Flown with everyone in the last three years (from BA to Thomsonfly) and things are becoming more difficult as the airlines become squeezed. Even BA is introducing maximum bag sizes for hold luggage from November.

    Things I like about low cost flyers.

    1. Normally, they are lower priced than the regulars and it's easier to arrange routes and fly into places near where you want to go and there are more departure options (eg Swiss were trying to charge me £1571 for a regular single from Zurich to Birmingham this summer - eh?!)

    2. They try to leave and arrive on time and don't wait for late passengers. BA is so useless - it's always late.

    3. You don't have to pay for stuff you don't want and you can always buy water/sandwiches on the ground first - BA only provide a drink and a small bag of snacks - hardly great service.

    4. You can change the ticket for a small fee without having to pay for the outrageously expensive flexible ticket that the majors sell - regular £60, flexible £320.

    5. You can avoid Heathrow - even with T5, still hate it. Still rubbish connections to anywhere but London and always late to leave.

    But they are getting much more pernickity. You really have to check the small print, especially on baggage now.

    * BMIbaby has a smaller check-in bag size and some European low cost have introduced a 6kg check-in bag maximum, presumably to increase the number of hold bags

    * Ryanair has a 15kg maximum hold bag size, BMI it is 20kg. No aggregating - which isn't very good for a family - and the policy is not evenly applied, you might travel out with a heavier bag OK, but then get charged on the return. And it's extremely expensive for heavier bags. (By the way BA will do this too from Nov)

    * Some airlines force you to go through check-in even where you have no bags

    * On board prices are extreme (Easyjet is cheapest but still expensive)

    * You have to unclick a lot of options they try to add - it's easy to miss that insurance option, particularly since it will probably be invalid if you already have other travel insurance.

    If they do cancel flights they have to pay and there's a penalty charge they must pay (up to £250 per person). It's EU law. Naturally this is not widely advertised by them.

  15. Tony

    Never want to fly RyanAir again

    I made the mistake of booking a flight with RyanAir about 9 months or so ago after 'a friend' persuaded me it was much cheaper than other carriers and I can honestly say that I never want to put myself through that again.

    Firstly.. Stanstead Airport.

    Apparently it's in London. What zone is that then? Zone 6000? It's in the arse-end of nowhere. On top of that it is without doubt the chavviest airport in the world. I have never seen so much fake-burberry print luggage in my life! Not to mention the entire thing is crammed with so many fruit machines that it feels like you are waiting for your flight in some God-awful arcade.

    So, having spent 6 hours waiting for a flight that was delayed for no specified reason surrounded by neanderthals drinking stella and trying to avoid suffering an epileptic fit from all the blinking lights on the fruities, I finally boarded the plane.

    It was dirty, it was cramped, it smelled bad and there was some thankfully-unidentifiable substance caked on the carpet. The cabin staff were rude and about as helpful as a Greek road sign. On top of this I had to spend my flight surrounded by screaming children and the aforementioned neanderthals who by this time had been drinking Stella for eight hours and had apparently checked their deodorant into the hold without thinking to actually put any on first. They tried to charge me a small fortune for a meal, which I politely declined, the smell of chav armpit having long since robbed me of any appetite - although to be fair even if I had been fasting for a month and they were paying me to eat it, I doubt I would have found RyanAir food an attractive proposition.

    When (with great relief) I arrived at my destination, it was at some backwater airport where the only other flight scheduled to arrive that day was a flock of geese. I then faced a two hour ride to get to where I actually wanted to go, crammed into a near-derelict bus with one of the drunken chavs snoring and dribbling on my shoulder.

    The entire experience was so thoroughly unpleasant it actually spoiled my entire trip, as all I could think about was having to go through it all again on the journey home.

    So, in summary.. Ryan Air WAS about £35 cheaper than flying with BA, but I would happily pay several times that amount to never have to endure their 'service' again. In addition, as a special thanks for recommending them, I signed my 'friend' up for a number of 'speciality' German websites.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I get exactly what I pay for and they do exactly what it says on the tin.

    Thing is, on the tin it says it's 99p, if you examine the tin closer you see tax, handling fees, charges for luggage, a warning notice about their blaring bloody adverts that you'll have to sit through for 2 hours.

    Admittedly some charges are avoidable, and that's a plus point, but not listing compulsory charges in the main price is deliberately misleading.

    And their planes stink.

    >What these aggregators are doing is no different from an old-fashioned travel agent

    Old-fashioned travel agents have agreements from the operators.

    >the end consumer does not have a contract with Ryanair

    That depends what was written on the booking, if the scraper has been dumb enough to put the company name down then you have a point.

    BTW Most airline tickets can be cancelled by the airline, many of them say you should reconfirm 72 hours in advance of travel.

    Mostly though, they're just dirty..

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @Tom & MS

    To use online check-in you must print the check-in 'slip' with IE, it comes out blank on Firefox. Speaking from experience

  18. dave
    Thumb Down

    Ryanair want the Extra Money

    Ryanair are simply wanting the extra money provided by the other services they provide.

    Baggage

    Early/Speedy boarding

    Hotels Cars Etc.

    The funny thing is that they use WWTE worldwide travel exchange to provide their hotels. WWTE is owned by Expedia, therefore Expedia are providing this service.

    Most screenscrapers are only using the airlines site to get the prices, there bookings are then made directly on the airlines website, and the credit card payment is made to the airline.

    Given that some online agencys provide upto 100 seats sold a day for some of these so call low cost airlines I can't understand why they are complaining so much. At least the planes will fly full.

    I remember reading the easyjet vs Expedia issue a few months ago. The reported really didn't do any research and everything she said was in the whole not factually correct.

  19. heystoopid
    Paris Hilton

    @williamW

    @william irrespective of all that claimed cash in the bank first we have to deduct the provisional bad and doubtful debts , that which is owed to the staff /directors pensions funds , share dividend payments held over from previous year to mid or single end of year lump sum payment , lease and capital equipment payment funds , GST tax receipts due(one of the few taxes companies cannot avoid not paying) , aircraft maintenance costs pending(them planes they fly don't fix themselves) the total balance of other accounts payable and so forth along with other mundane payments required to fund corporations !

    All this data is buried in the annual stock holders filings and supposedly certified by accountants as being up to standard ? (well good old AA said much ado about nothing until the ever hollow shell of ENRON and their supposedly unsinkable Accountant Heavy Battle Cruiser "AA Ethics In My A@#$%" sank to the bottom of red ink sea in first and only one opening broadside from the FTC/SEC and in the US, the IRS has both KPMG and Ernst Who ?, singing like canaries in an iron cage thanks to their lack of ethics over questionable tax filing activities ! )

    Oh well such is life , the old accounting book has many pages to be read and digested so says the socialite !

  20. John Sturdy
    Stop

    re: Why don't they just

    If they do something like that, they'll probably make it impossible to use with screen readers (for the blind) -- although I expect most blind travellers are avoiding Ryanair already after a well-publicized incident of some being turned away. However, it could give someone a chance to bring a discrimination case.

  21. Dan White
    Thumb Down

    Not-so-budget fares

    A week or so ago there was an article on "The One Show" I think, where they costed up flights for a family of four with luggage across the "budget" and regular airlines.

    After factoring in the luggage fees, booking fees, handling charges etc etc from the budget lines (fees that were included in the regular airlines), it turned out that Easyjet and RyanAir were more expensive than BA for EVERY combination of flights they tried.

    As I understood it the budget airlines have already been ordered to include all fees up front in their listings, but they're dragging their heels for as long as possible because it's "technically difficult". Well boo fucking hoo.

    Yes you can get the occasional good deal, but unless it saves me about £100 I'd rather travel with an airline that doesn't ban staff from charging mobile phones to save money...

  22. Wize

    Meh

    "I doubt a £1.99 flight with airport tax, tax, 1 bag and credit card free. Would make nowhere near £150."

    Was for me. Booked one for me and the missus the other day. Flight was 30 quid for the two of us.

    Then all the fees kick in.

    You want a bag in the hold? Thats extra.

    You want to check in? Thats extra

    You want to pay by credit card (how else can you pay online?) Thats extra.

    To name but a few. I'm surprised they didn't charge more for a life jacket under the seat or wings on the plane.

    Then a handling fee. What for? For handling all the money you are making off me? Not like its an optional extra, so really part of the original cost of the flight.

    And their bag sizes are smaller than everyone else, so you are more likely to breach the limit and therefore pay more.

    At least Dick Turpin wore a mask so you could tell when you were being robbed.

  23. Tom

    Re Firefox

    last time I went to the Ryanair site it told me I needed IE7 to book.

  24. trackSuit
    Thumb Up

    Progressive Talk.

    Yes we have AC,13th August 2008 18:23 GMT.

    How dDelightful to hear you can mostly understand amfM. Will you be sure to say how you do IT, when other ACs are struggling with parsing?

    I'm glad we can Share Agreement that GBirish is not so hard to understand when IT is done Right.

    Here's to the Reg for their NeuReal Tolerance and Alias-Named Torrents of Tolerants.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    You get what you pay for. I would rather fly Ryanair than most airlines in europe.

    I used to be a terrible snob about airlines and have a large pile of frequent flyer points with the oneworld airline based in my home country to show for it (mostly earned on that once apparently decent airline, BA).

    Last year, my girlfriend decided that she wanted to live in Rome. I wanted to see her at least once a month and flying out there and back on BA, Lufthansa, AF/KLM or that airborne disaster called Alitalia (they're still flying 727s, FFS) was far too expensive. I therefore started flying easyjet from gatwick, which was also the most convenient airport.

    As the weather started to warm up, even easyjet started feeling expensive, so i held my nose, gritted my teeth and started taking the Stansted "Express" (Express in name alone) out to the wilds of Essex to catch the airline that is the subject of this article.

    After a couple of these trips, I was well attuned to the joys of priority boarding (though at Ciampino airport in Rome all that gets you is first onto the bus) and understood the system well enough to get myself into an aisle seat in the 2nd or 3rd row, everytime, nearly always with an empty seat next to me.

    Contrast that with the last time I flew BA, back from Stockholm early in the new year. Despite my girlfriend and my tickets being booked together, we ended up in middle seats, three rows apart. I wasn't enjoying my Ruby Oneworld status on that flight, that's for sure.

    I wouldn't check baggage for any trip less than two weeks, on any airline, so that's not a problem. I also became quickly appreciative of the vastly superior terminal that is stansted, especially compared with the minge pit that is gatwick south terminal. God forbid that I should ever have to travel through Heathrow again...

    I also gradually became grudgingly appreciative of ryanair's no nonsense attitude. Most people interpret this as nastiness, which in reality of course it is, but whether that's a problem or not depends on your expectations. I expect Ryanair to treat me like an item of livestock to be moved from point A to point B and have a thing called an MP3 player that allows me to avoid all of their 2-4-1 spirit promotions, phone cards, scratch tickets, timeshares, mail order brides and whatever else they've dreamed up to sell on board.

    Easyjet, by contrast, tries very hard to be nice and it just doesn't work. If you're going to treat me like livestock, I'd prefer to not also have to put up with fake smiles and pretend customer service.

    Michael O'Leary is clearly a lunatic but his airline moves a lot of people around europe at affordable prices (well until the price of oil hit the roof, anyway). If he doesn't want third party companies to sell his products, that's his call to make.

  26. Jonathan McCulloch
    Stop

    @Wize

    "At least Dick Turpin wore a mask so you could tell when you were being robbed."

    You're not being robbed. If you book and fly with them, you do so consensually. If you don't, can't or won't read the website, then whose fault is it? At the point you put in your credit-card details, the final amounts are clearly shown.

    Rather than pissing and moaning about it, don't fucking fly with them. Same goes for all of you.

    The market decides.

    -- Jon

    P.S. I've booked using FireFox every single time I've used them (and printed out my boarding card).

  27. Joe Desbonnet
    Jobs Horns

    Ryanair.com does *NOT* work properly with Firefox

    Just to follow up on some comments here re Ryanair.com and Firefox: No actually it doesn't work. Yes, you can book tickets etc, but you can't print your boarding pass. With Firefox 3 on Linux anyway (just kills FF -- no idea why). And seeing that Microsoft have been scurrying around on their web site one wonders if it's a bug or feature.

    What's worse: there is absolutely no way to report the bug, except to call a sex line number. Now I can image how that slowly that conversation will go.

    Having said that I love Ryanair. Even if you dislike traveling with them they have put a huge downward pressure on air ticket costs. And Micheal O'Leary is always good for a laugh even if he's full of $h1t most of the time :-)

  28. Jason
    Boffin

    Easy retaliation

    Remember - the problem Rynair has is with the booking of tickets through other websites. No one can really stop other websites delivering search results including Rynairs prices and then refering the customer to the actual Rynair site for purchase. (Think kayak.com). So .... this opens the door to mischief. For instance an aggregator can simply put whatever price they want for the Rynair flight and steer their customers via price comparison to other, more friendly airlines.

    The real problem here for Ryaniar is comparison elimination, not booking per se.

  29. paul fox

    contract

    I think the contract is only valid with scheduled flights, RyanAir is charter. I've rarely felt the need to use a budget carrier. The market will sort itself out.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Evil but right

    Michael O'Leary was on Newsnight a couple of nights ago. He really is an odious little man, but he's right about one thing.

    For all the complaints made about Ryanair in the press, Ryanair's sales are at worst level if not increasing, despite his company's Spanish (or should that be Irish) practices.

    Truth is, although commentators (including people on here) are disgusted by Ryanair's practices, thier numerous hidden charges, thier willingness to leave cripples on the tarmac rather than help them onto planes, and now the cancellation of legally bought tickets, people still use them.

    There's no point having high morals if you're unwilling to live by them. If most people were disgusted enough with Ryanair they'd pass on the £15 airfares and pay to go with a more ethical airline. Frankly I'm amazed that anyone with a disability even thinks about booking with them (although that of course is what O'Leary would prefer as the crips just take up space on his planes and cost him money)

  31. A J Stiles

    Re: "Old-fashioned travel agents have agreements from the operators"

    ..... and were glad of them.

    If you're on the dole, you can have your payments cut for refusing an offer of work.

    Ryanair should be pleased that people are sending business their way. I hope they lose.

    AC, "Evil but right" -- you've hit the nail on the head. People used to stick together and did this thing where if you were cut, your neighbour would bleed. (Remember the Miners' Strike, or the Poll Tax?) Nowadays ..... they don't. Something changed.

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