Ryanair "cancels bookings through screenscrapers." The FlightChecker ISN’T affected

MSE_Martin

Last week, the BBC and papers reported Ryanair would cancel flights booked through screenscrapers. Actually its more about sites which add booking fees, a rarity in the UK. Specifically for those worried who’ve used this site’s FlightChecker, don’t be, all it does is provide info, you can’t book through it, we just link you to Ryanair’s home page to book.

Sadly a by-product of Ryanair's attempt to block booking fee websites is it’s blocked access to ALL flight comparisons, including the FlightChecker. I’ve been talking to a member of its Board to try and sort this, and it may take some time, but here’s hoping.

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kilrail

I have used Ryanair extensively booking direct but also through Fleetwaytravel.com which link hotels and flights to provide a holiday (as most travel agents do). They utilise the low cost airlines and we had no idea that Ryanair would take offence at this.

In fact the last 3 holidays were booked this way with no problems.
However, trying to figure out what is actually happening now is damn near impossible. The news media are saying if tickets were booked this way you could be turned away at the desk and our friends who used Otbeach.com to book a 3 week holiday in Almeria in September don't know if their booking is valid or not.
Otbeach simply say negotiations with Ryanair are ongoing - Ryanair phone lines are constantly engaged (even at £1 per min) so our pensioner friends are worried, to the extent that they are considering booking again with Ryanair direct.

I am a fan of Ryanair and even admire Michael O'Leary for his business brain but I fear on this occasion he has got it wrong and it is a PR disaster. OK he doesn't like so called screen scrapers but most people wouldn't have a clue what he is talking about as all they may have done is book a holiday through what they perceive as an online Travel Agent.

Surely, the right thing would be to warn people in advance and not punish retrospectively or does he think Alastair Darling has given the green light on this sort of behaviour with his vehicle excise duty rates.
Also I'm sure he has access to software experts who could block these sites so it wouldn't be a problem in the first place. Then if the online "Travel Agents" wanted to book flights to link to hotels, they could do it on behalf of their customer using the details supplied i.e. customer email address, customer credit/ debit card etc.

I hope there will soon be some confirmation as to what is actually happening as I don't know of anyone really being turned away at the Ryanair desk, unless of course someone knows different.

iwantitnow

Ryanair no longer display a range of dates either side when you tick the "My dates are flexible" option.

You will also find they restrict the number of times you can display the "Next Day" or "Previous Day" when searching for the cheapest flights.

Looks like they are trying to make it harder for those of us who don't care where and when we go but just want a free/chesp flight

meester

MSE_Martin wrote: »

Last week, the BBC and papers reported Ryanair would cancel flights booked through screenscrapers. Actually its more about sites which add booking fees, a rarity in the UK. Specifically for those worried who’ve used this site’s FlightChecker, don’t be, all it does is provide info, you can’t book through it, we just link you to Ryanair’s home page to book.

Sadly a by-product of Ryanair's attempt to block booking fee websites is it’s blocked access to ALL flight comparisons, including the FlightChecker. I’ve been talking to a member of its Board to try and sort this, and it may take some time, but here’s hoping.

That's not true now is it?

I just searched Skyscanner for flights from UK to Spain, and it gave me this set of results:

Gerona Ryanair£15.67

Reus Ryanair and First Choice£19.98

Palma Ryanair, bmi, bmibaby, ...£24.98

Valencia Ryanair, clickair, easyJet, ...£29.89

Granada Ryanair£29.98

Valladolid Ryanair£29.98

Madrid Ryanair, Air Europa, bmibaby, ...£34.35

Murcia Ryanair, bmibaby, easyJet, ...£35.55

Alicante Ryanair, bmibaby, easyJet, ...£37.59

Bilbao easyJet and clickair£38.76

Barcelona Aer Lingus, bmibaby, British Airways, ...£38.90

Jerez Ryanair£38.90

Santander Ryanair£38.90

Santiago de Compostela Ryanair£38.90

Zaragoza Ryanair£38.90

richardw

Some of those prices are 5 days old, doesn't seem reliable to me.

kilrail

So what would be the advice for people who have booked through "Travel Agents" - Book again direct with Ryanair (at now higher prices) or wait for the Travel Agent to tell you you will be getting a refund or your flight is still OK.

I suppose the safe option is book again but if , in this case, Otbeach.com reach some agreement with Ryanair, then you would be wasting your money - bit of a dilemma!!

meester

richardw wrote: »

Some of those prices are 5 days old, doesn't seem reliable to me.

Says 'last updated 8 hours ago' on the one I checked.

I'd say it's working. MSE's more commercial competitor skyscanner consistently provides a better service than the MSE flight checker - one of the good things about having entire business depending on overcoming these sort of problems is that they tend to fix them!

bagand96

Setting aside who's flightchecker may be better, it is probably worth mentioning here for information, that Skyscanner and Moneysupermarket/Travelsupermarket are also unaffected, as these websites, like Martin's, send you to the airlines direct booking site.

computerdutch

Hi, we have used FlightChecker countless times and found it was a great way of looking for our frequent flights over to France saving time and money. Fingers crossed that Ryanair allow it to continue soon.

wimbledonian

Could it be that Ryanair's real concern is that the screenscraper and comparison flights show the true cost of the flight up front rather than Ryanair's own sites which require you to go through most of the booking procedure before you can identify the full cost? The result for me, since I always use the moneysavingexpert site or skyscanner.net is that I will only look at Ryanair if there is no viable alternative. But then I suppose that is no change, Ryanair is always last resort for me - their 'the more we treat our customers badly the more they will love us' strategy does not wash with me. The rumours that they do not pay their pilots if they go off sick don't endear me to them either.

smala01

The real problem here is that screenscaping websites "hit" the ryanair website many million times a day, using huge amounts of the available server bandwidth. This means that customers using the ryanair website directly get a slow experience and ryanair has had to switch off some functionality because of this.

The difference between those targeted by Ryanair and site like MSE and SKYSCANNER is that these scrapers are not live, and show data that is one or two days old. This is still very useful as it give us an idea of prices and we accept that the price can move by a few quid (usually down in my experience from skyscanner). This method is 1000 times more efficient than screenscraping “live” data every time a user request a price.

These sites also direct you to the Ryanair site to make the final booking (with dates filled in) - but it still allows you buy ancillary items (extra baggage, car hire, lottery etc) which is a huge proportion of ryanairs profit. One assumes the booking fee scrapers deprive ryanair of some of this revenue.

Ryanair has some very strange business concepts and can get away with doing strange things!

Smala01