Newsstand - Ryanair to start cancelling bookings made through third party sites

The Consumers' Association of Ireland has condemned Ryanair after the low-cost airline today announced that they would not recognise bookings made through intermediary websites. (http://www.rte.ie/business/2008/0807/ryanair.html)

My favourite quote is this one from Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary:

'We want to cause as much chaos for the screen scrapers as possible.'

Completely ignoring, of course, that the chaos here is caused for passengers and not the screen scrapers at all.

Up yours Michael O'Leary. May you rot in hell!!!

:eek: An idea ripe for network carriers in this country to poach, perhaps? It has 'enhancement' written all over it.

Thanks for posting that. Researching air tickets is a lot of work, so it's nice to know there's one airline I can just decide never to bother about again.

I don't remember seeing a lot of LCC's bookable by the big third party sites anyway. I've never seen Jetblue, Easyjet, and a host of other on travelocity, orbitz and the like. Always figured if you wanted to book a LCC, you had to go to their site.

I don't remember seeing a lot of LCC's bookable by the big third party sites anyway. I've never seen Jetblue, Easyjet, and a host of other on travelocity, orbitz and the like. Always figured if you wanted to book a LCC, you had to go to their site.

JetBlue is available through 3rd party systems and has been for about a year now. WN is not. SkyBus wasn't, IIRC.

I don't remember seeing a lot of LCC's bookable by the big third party sites anyway. I've never seen Jetblue, Easyjet, and a host of other on travelocity, orbitz and the like. Always figured if you wanted to book a LCC, you had to go to their site.

Spirit, JetBlue, Frontier, bmi, easyjet and Airtran all show up on Kayak, my favorite, sourced from orbitz or cheapticket. Southwest shows up, schedule only.

btw - AA's dispute has them no longer appearing at Kayak - bad move.



What exactly is the point of this effort? Ryan still gets the revenue correct? From their reputation, I'm sure they don't pay a fee to anyone. The only thing I could come up with initially was infrastructure load, but a screen scraper takes as much capacity as a person.

Do they sell ads on their site and are afraid of losing revenue due to lower traffic/fewer eyes?

Doesn't seem worth having a large number of people show up for your flight and have to try to turn them away.

They are merely looking for different organisations to blame for their own shortcomings. I think they'll be a lot more of this kind of PR to come before the (hopefully at least) financial destruction of that company.

(These are only my own personal views; no one elses').

If I set up a web page with an http://www.ryanair.com link - and someone clicks that link and then books a Ryanair ticket, or if someone clicks this http://ww.ryanair.com link on FlyerTalk and books a Ryanair ticket, that will still be allowed, will it not?

Is this for instances where a travel agent creates a package involving a Ryanair flight and a hotel or something, and then marks it up to the consumer?

Michael O'Leary really is an objectionable little toe rag. I used to fly Ryanair regularly for leisure purposes. They weren't brilliant but also nothing to really complain about. His policies have since made it a very unpleasent experience to fly with Ryanair. I have choosen to fly with other airlines if I have an option and havent set foot on one of their aircraft in over a year.

The shareholders really need to ditch this man before he drives the company into the ground.

'We want to cause as much chaos for the screen scrapers as possible.'

Screen scrapers are websites which compare costs from different airlines, and can also be used to book flights.

Asked what will happen to people who have booked on these sites, Mr O'Leary said: 'They won't be flying.'

He said that passengers are 'getting stiffed' on these sites, which usually charge more than fares quoted on Ryanair.com.

Ryanair will refund the cost of the flight to the intermediary website. In such bookings, Mr O'Leary said, Ryanair does not deal directly with passengers, nor does it have e-mail addresses for them.

Passing the refund on - and refunding the cost which the intermediary site charged - will be left up to that site.Wow -- what an attitude. :td: What a great way to keep your customers. :rolleyes: :td:

WN is available in SABRE GDS, so travel agents with SABRE can book WN directly through their system. I guess this counts as a third-party sites.

As for the legality of this action by Mr. O'Liar, I am sure it will be contested in court and found to be anti-competitive by Brussels and he'll have to back off.

I've read in the press a gadzillian times (100K times more than a Brazilian :D) that Ryanair is going to do this, but have they?

I haven't seen 1 report of Mr. & Mrs. FRugal traveller being affected by this.

Is this really just a load of hot air to get their 'threat' publicised (and discourage use of screenscraping sites)?

Interested to know if you know of anyone who actually has had a booking cancelled.

(:td: Why does the press have to publish every comment MOL makes???)