Last year, Ryanair started a battle against online travel agents (OTAs), with airline CEO Michael O’Leary calling them “pirates” for adding hidden mark-ups to air fares and misleading customers.
The airline also complained repeatedly about OTA failure to communicate passenger details, claiming that this affected the flow of information between passengers and the airline. OTAs, whose services include the collation of flights so that customers have the chance to compare times, cost and duration, accused Ryanair in return of wanting to scrape passenger information for direct selling.
Following the increasing complains, major OTAs removed Ryanair flights from their platforms in December, including Booking.com, Kiwi and Kayak. At the time, a verification conducted by Skift revealed that, while Booking.com does not sell the Ryanair flights directly anymore, it links to another OTA, OneTravel.com, where customers can get Ryanair tickets.
Since then, the airline has reached a number of deals with several such platforms, starting with Loveholidays and, most recently, including Kiwi, the Etraveli and Expedia groups. Besides the new “approved OTAs”, Ryanair flights are also shown on Google Flights, which has been praised in the past for being an “honest/transparent OTA’s, who does not add hidden mark ups to Ryanair prices and who directs passengers to make their bookings directly on the Ryanair.com website.”
One of the platforms that the carrier still has not reached an agreement with is Booking.com. In fact, the clash went so far as to Ryanair suing the platform in the US for violating the country’s computer fraud and abuse act (CFAA) and Booking.com countersuing the airline for defamation.
Last week, the jury in a Delaware Court unanimously ruled in favour of Ryanair’s claims that Booking.com had violated the CFAA, causing loss to the carrier. The jury also ruled that Booking.com had done so knowingly, with “intent to defraud”, and that Ryanair had suffered economic harm as a result of the platform’s unlawful screen scraping activity. The jury also dismissed all of Booking.com’s counterclaims against Ryanair, which included claims for defamation, unfair competition and deceptive trade practices.
“It is unacceptable that global giants, like Booking.com (mkt cap $133 billion), have been engaged in these illegal and deceptive practices for many years with the intent to defraud both Ryanair and consumers”, O’Leary commented on the ruling. “We expect that this ruling will end the internet piracy and overcharging perpetrated on both airlines and other travel companies and consumers by the unlawful activity of OTA Pirates like Booking.com. (…) This ruling is a great victory for low fare air travel, and it’s a great win for the travelling public as well.”
Meanwhile, Booking.com has said it plans to appeal the decision because “allowing customers to access and compare fares across the travel industry promotes consumer choice”.
It remains to be seen what the outcome of the appeal will be or if, in the meantime, the two will manage to bury the hatchet and make Booking the latest platform on Ryanair’s approved OTAs list.
