back to article EU Ryanair 'screen-scraping' case could affect biz models

Some price comparison websites and other online businesses could be forced to alter their business models if the EU's highest court takes steps to prevent unauthorised "screen-scraping" of data, an expert has said. The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) is due to hear arguments today from Ryanair and a Dutch price comparison …

  1. solo

    "..The ability to stop a competitor,... is fundamental to the operation of the internet.."

    I am tired of everyone stating his own view of the fundamental rights. The internet is for sharing. If you want this to be protected, put log-in system.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      User 'solo' says...

      > I am tired of everyone stating his own view of the fundamental rights

      Then proceeds to state his own view. :-)

      1. solo

        Re: User 'solo' says...

        Humble apologies. But 'sharing' comes from the literal meaning of the word 'Internet'. It's not our 'fundamental' right though, and I don't claim that.

    2. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Happy

      solo,

      The internet is not for sharing. Or stopping competitors...

      The Internet is for Porn

      1. Number6
  2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    No case

    I'd be surprised if the court sees any case for protection as the use is quite clearly in the interest of a fair, free and open market: the data is already publicly available and the price comparison site is not presenting it as its own.

    Another question would be the right for the site to charge a commission because Ryanair does have the right to choose intermediaries.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: No case

      Wouldn't this also apply to price labels in a shop?

      I can't comparison shop becuase by reading your supermarket's price label I have to agree to your T&Cs

  3. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    Genuinely stupid in the case of Ryanair

    Ryanair operates a dynamic demand based pricing scheme (same as 99% of the airlines out there). All they need to do to kill any and every price comparison site is to increase the frequency of recomputation to the levels used by Iberia/BA (instantaneous recompute on ticket purchase) or (Sl)EasyJet - recompute based on number of views of a particular time/price segment.

    From there on any information held by price comparison sites which do not have a contract to get a realtime feed is completely worthless (as is the case with BA/Iberia prices on price comparison sites).

    However, instead of this O'Leary is being well... O'Leary. Changing of triggers and recomputation intervals in a dynamic pricing algorithm requires re-running the math models and sometimes doing some proper math work by a proper mathematician specializing in optimal control. That costs quite a lot of money and most airlines (including O'Leary) do not keep these on payroll - they actually contract people from universities to do that for them. So back on O'Leary being O'Leary - he is as usually cheapskating instead of paying someone to both improve his margins and solve this once and for all.

    1. stu 4

      Re: Genuinely stupid in the case of Ryanair

      I find the BA prices always accurate on the comparison sites. I've used them a number of times this year alone ?

      I would have thought however frequent the calculations are done, provided there is only a matter of minutes between the comparison data being captured, and a purchase being made they are very unlikely to be different (i.e. unlikely to have been other ticket sales for that flight in the interval) ?

      1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

        Re: Genuinely stupid in the case of Ryanair

        I find the BA prices always accurate on the comparison sites. I've used them a number of times this year alone ?

        BA/Iberia is not being CheapSkate Air - they have multiple APIs including the legacy industry standard ones used by global booking systems. They do not make an issue from you having their current price so most price comparison sites get a realtime feed instead of screen-scraping. They do change them in realtime though - if you book BA or Iberia via Amex or Cason Corporate Travel you will see a warning that for these particular airlines the price is an estimate until ticketed.

        Ditto for EasyJet - while they do not hook up to the normal global booking systems, they feed current price via APIs.

        In either case there is _NO_ database backend except for a temporary and ephemeral storage of pricing data. The actual prices are produced by an algorithm so there is neither creative nor informative content in the database - it is purely a transfer and IPC medium.

        It is only RyanAir which is making an issue out of it as if it is some super duper magic.

    2. MJI Silver badge

      Would you use an airline?

      Where the pilots earn substantially less than you?

      1. d3vy

        Re: Would you use an airline?

        Where the pilots earn substantially less than you?

        I guess that depends what you do for a living... If I worked in McDonalds... probably not!

        1. MJI Silver badge

          Re: Would you use an airline?

          Quite a few of us are on average wages and not high wages.

          What sort of pilot are you going to get when you do not pay enough to buy a house say near London?

          New ones, ones sacked from other airlines, and so on.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Would you use an airline?

            > What sort of pilot are you going to get when you do not pay enough to buy a house say near London?

            There is a chronic oversupply of pilots on the market, which is precisely why the salaries are so low. Some airlines even have a pay-to-fly program (EZY used to be one of them).

            However, it would be wrong to make inferences as to the quality of flight crew based on the wages they may or may not earn.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Would you use an airline?

        > Where the pilots earn substantially less than you?

        I can think of a number of airlines where that would be the case (my first paycheck was just a tad over €1000.- not that many years ago), but Ryanair is certainly not one of them.

        Their pay is amongst the best in Europe, and their training and procedures are second to none. Of course, their working environment is not for everyone--to put it mildly, but then again ex-RYR pilots are the most sought-after in the industry, as they are a known quantity and high quality.

        Disclaimer: I never worked for RYR (I applied but did not pass). Number of friends of mine do work for this company though, and I have the greatest of respect for them as pilots and as professionals.

        I hope this helps dispel a myth.

        1. MJI Silver badge

          Re: Would you use an airline?

          Funny I am sure I read a few years ago the pay was pretty poor? However it was definately a budget airline.

          Anyway thankyou for correcting me.

      3. disgruntled yank

        Re: Would you use an airline?

        Then what is the alternative for CEOs, professional athletes, and so on? Use a company jet where the pilots make substantially less than you?

    3. Gordon 10

      Re: Genuinely stupid in the case of Ryanair

      Whilst I agree with you on O'Leary being O'Leary I disagree with you on Ryan air using the same seat pricing models as their competition. Afaik they use a far simpler time based model.

      Source - 5 years or so ago I was on the project that deployed one of these pricing models into the other Irish Airline of note - an identical system that was used by both BA and Virgin.

      As with all things IT they didn't develop their own internal models they bought in a software package from a vendor that employed a whole gang of clever mathematicians.

      Now maybe its changed in the last 5 years but knowing O'Leary's cheap skateryness I doubt it.

      Now your employing Grad comment on the cheap - was an accurate description of how RA started their online booking site, but even that became outsourced to one of the specialists in this kind of thing, one of the more niche GDS players when such terms were still relevant.

      Afaik you are also oversimplifying on the API front as well - whilst actual price calculations may be ephemeral - the inventory data their are based on certainly isn't (with the possible exception of RA in this case, as they never used inventory based pricing).

  4. Vincent Ballard

    I'm more worried about "To gain access to the flight information, PR Aviation had to agree to Ryanair's terms and conditions". How many of the dodgy practices around website "T&Cs" is the CJEU going to (possibly inadvertently) set a precedent for?

    1. John Robson Silver badge

      Click through

      Or just small print with a link off to other T&C's somewhere

      What happened to limitations on click through T&C's - is it possible to access the information without passing through the T&C's?

      1. Velv

        Re: Click through

        "By clicking Find Flights IAgree to website terms of use" in tiny faint letters above the huge Ryanair blue Find Flights button

        So not even a tick box.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Michael O' Leary famously considered a pay-per-pee scheme back in 2009

    no, he did not. He just used it, as per usual ryanair tactics, to generate publicity for his company in mass-media - for ever and for free - which works, as is clearly demonstrated by this article.

  6. MrXavia
    Facepalm

    I don't get this...

    Surely having your flights available ON price comparison websites is going to get you more business? Surely it makes more sense to offer an API for access to data?

    1. Kevin Johnston

      Except that if people are buying it through a comparison web-site you are missing the chance to have them accidentally buy all sorts of other services where they didn't notice that a tick in one place meant No while elsewhere it meant Yes.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Or that to not have insurance you have to choose "don't insure me" from the drop down labelled "what country are you from" and see that option hidden 1/4 way down just between Denmark and Finland!

        https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BaApQdwCcAAYNNr.png:large

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Facepalm

          damn, AC

          I thought you were kidding.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > Surely having your flights available ON price comparison websites is going to get you more business?

      It's not the having the prices on a comparison website per se. It's the comparison website directly selling the tickets to you that they have an issue with.

      For example, you can get RYR schedules from Skyscanner and they're fine with that, but that's because Skyscanner does not sell tickets.

      1. GavinC

        > Surely having your flights available ON price comparison websites is going to get you more business?

        >It's not the having the prices on a comparison website per se. It's the comparison website directly selling the tickets to you that they have an issue with.

        Interesting that they would allow SkyScanner. Ryanair portrays itself as being the cheapest carrier, and relies on this image to attract brand loyalty amongst customers. For many passengers, they go straight to Ryanair.com, find the fare acceptable and book without shopping around, assuming ryanair will always be the cheapest option (which it often isn't).

        If they allow comparison sites to show their fares, then people will stop visiting ryanair.com and instead shop around more, killing any brand loyalty they have managed to build.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          > Ryanair portrays itself as being the cheapest carrier, and relies on this image to attract brand loyalty amongst customers

          Ryanair (and Easy's) business model is not one of selling cheap seats, but one of taking lots of people to a place--their actual customers are regional governments and chambers of commerce (source: « Payer les passagers pour voyager », Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2008. The title of the article is an actual quote from EZY's CEO).

          Interestingly, RYR's model make them the "greenest" form of short- and mid-haul transport. By far greener, on a pax/mile basis, than train or road transport, once the infrastructure costs and environmental impact have been taken into account¹. Unfortunately, politicians love to milk air travel for taxes so this is a bit of an inconvenient truth.

          ¹ At the risk of oversimplifying, with air travel all you need is a plane, a load of fuel (less per pax/mile than car/bus, much less than boats), two miles of asphalt at either end, and a bunch of radio transmitters every couple hundred K along the way. In addition to this, RYR operate in such a way as to make them very efficient (and therefore greener). For example, their travelling to less congested airports makes it more unlikely that they will suffer delays, and they pioneered the use of constant descent profiles (aka glide approaches) in Europe.

  7. Richard Cranium

    What use is listing Ryanair on comparison sites? Book for Paris expecting to arrive at CDG? or maybe Orly or Le Bourget? No, Welcome to "Paris" Beauvais.

    Then if Ryan lists a price of £1 so you go for it then find that if you don't use all the complicated techniques to avoid extra charges you end up paying as much as for a better carrier but as you are then subsidising the successful freeloaders the overall experience is garbage.

    Even if the price comparison site I use listed Ryan I'd disregard their offerings.

    Having said that, my first flight to "Paris" about 50 years ago would have made Ryan look like a luxury. Coach from London to tin shack terminal at (not sure Lydd, or Lympne) very short flight, just over the channel to a similar one man and a dog airfield and coach to Paris. (Don't tell O'Leary, we don't want to give him ideas.)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > Book for Paris expecting to arrive at CDG? or maybe Orly or Le Bourget? No, Welcome to "Paris" Beauvais.

      Not everyone wants to go to Paris (although, OK, nobody will ever want to go to Beauvais of their own free will). Smaller airports are a lot more civilised and comparatively more efficient, aside from potentially closer to your actual destination, so at least some travellers will deliberately choose Ryanair or a similar option, if available and if the price is right (read: not more expensive!)

  8. Potemkine Silver badge
    WTF?

    WTF?!

    Ifr you don't want your data to be used by somebody else, don't put them on the web, dammit!

  9. TheresaJayne

    Just one thought, If this stops scraping of data off websites, one of the largest companies on the internet will lose their business model...

    How do search engines compile their indexes? - they scrape with bots.....

    Scraping is illegal - Google is out of business.

    So if a site allows Google to scrape via a robots.txt then anyone can scrape as long as they follow the rules on the robots.txt file.

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