Ryanair not to honor tickets bought through third-party websites

Ryanair, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and the largest low-cost carrier in Europe, has announced that the carrier will only allow flights to be bought through its Ryanair.com website and that bookings made through third-party price comparison websites will not be honoured. The decision, which is bound to affect thousands of Ryanair’s passengers adversely, takes effect from August 11, 2008, Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, said in statement.

“Ryanair will give refunds to all of the websites involved,” Michael O’Leary added, clarifying that “passing on those refunds to intending passengers will be a matter for the websites.”

O’Leary alleged in the statement that that passengers were being “stiffed” by these price comparison websites websites, as their prices were invariably higher than those available on ryanair.com

The new policy applies to travelling from August 11 and to those who have booked their travel on websites, including lastminute.com, v-tours, tui and Opodo

Ryanair, which has been characterised by rapid expansion as a result of the deregulation of the air t ravel industry in Europe in 1997, is the third largest airline in Europe in terms of passenger numbers. It has its biggest operational base at London Stansted Airport.

One consumer group said that there could be as many as 20,000 passengers who would be affected by Ryanair’s new policy and that refunding their money would be “a time-consuming and possibly costly PR nightmare for the websites involved.”

According to an aviation watchdog, though Ryanair will refund the fare to those travellers who had made bookings through third-party price comparison websites, they would not know that their flight has been cancelled until they arrive at the airport.

One consumer watchdog said that it was “staggered” by Ryanair’s moves by to cancel bookings made through websites other than the airline’s own website.

Price comparison websites uses a technique known as ‘screenscraping’ that uses bandwidth at the host site – in this case ryanair.com website. Screenscraping also can cost the ryanair.com website money for data transferred and can slow down response times for intending passengers at the website.

Screenscraping websites allow visitors to buy tickets on a carrier by bypassing the actual airline’s website. It is estimated that this type of sales amount to about 0.5% of all bookings made on Ryanair.

Aviation experts have pointed out two issues that have arisen out of Ryanair’s new policy: One, Ryanair misses out on revenue from ancillary sales, including travel insurance, hotel and car hire bookings when a passenger books through a third-party website. Two, those websites also have to access Ryanair’s inventory and schedules to provide accurate flight information for their customers.

Howard Millar, deputy chief executive of Ryanair, said in a separate statement: “Genuine passengers using Ryanair’s website have been suffering long processing times and slower access because of the huge volume of information being downloaded from our website by screenscrapers all over Europe.”

A week ago, Ryanair had succeeded, through legal action, in making the Irish screenscraping website BravoFly Ltd to remove all Ryanair flights from its price comparison service. And, a month ago, Ryanair had obtained an injunction against the German website V-tours.