Mum’s the word on why ultra low-cost carrier Ryanair went
dark on corporate travel booking sites in November 2023. We know that
Travelfusion stopped serving the content to Concur and a few other booking
tools. The content disappeared from Navan as well. Then, in early December 2023,
it also went missing from a number of online travel agencies, including some
big ones like Booking.com, Kiwi and Kayak.
The content blackout occurred in the wake of Ryanair’s successful
suit against one screen scraper technology called Flightbox, which the carrier
took to court for providing its content to unauthorized online travel outlets.
An Irish court ruled in the carrier’s favor last December. In publicizing the win
the carrier stated, “Ryanair does not have a commercial relationship with any
OTA or screenscraper and we strongly object to OTAs mis-selling our flights and
overcharging consumers. We encourage our customers to book directly with us
through ryanair.com or our mobile app.”
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has long referred to such companies
and OTAs as “pirates” that gather the carrier’s content via “screen scraper”
technologies and, according to O’Leary, proceed to mark up the fees to make a
profit. In addition to the action against Flightbox, the carrier has been in
active legal disputes over these issues with a number of OTAs, Booking.com
among them, along with Kayak, Priceline and Agoda. A Delaware court ruled on the
Booking suit this summer—in Ryanair’s favor. While Booking has denied involvement
in any so-called piracy, whether scraping for Ryanair content or marking up fees,
the court ruled that the OTA had induced a third party to do the scraping for them.
Booking has said it will appeal.
Amid its numerous legal disputes, the carrier also brandished its strategy sword toward an obstructionist solution. Ryanair last year
implemented a verification check for any tickets sold by unauthorized sellers,
the steps and burdens of which were decried by Booking.com in court papers as "onerous,
invasive, stressful, and wholly unnecessary" and which involved either a real-time photo upload, a seven-day non-synchronous identification process or a £55 at the airport.
What does it all have to do with business travel?
Whether it was Ryanair’s active litigation that spooked
Travelfusion into discontinuing its own practices in distributing the carrier’s
content or perhaps that the aggregator had become involved in too many customer aggravations regarding verification-driven
problems, we don’t know. The resulting re-engagement of corporate technology
entities directly with Ryanair content, however, was a notable change in the
wake of the broader outage.
Most notable was the initiation of a rare Concur direct
connect to Ryanair content. At the same time the booking tool and Ryanair
negotiated the carrier’s participation in TripLInk. Both avenues avoid
global distribution system fees, which Ryanair has studiously avoided (although
the carrier does have limited relationships with GDSs, but they exclude its
lowest fares).
The direct connect went live in the new Concur in late
October 2024 and includes the carrier’s “entire fare range,” according to
Concur. The TripLink participation, however, won’t launch until sometime in the
first half of 2025.
Ryanair has since provided new linkages to a handful of now-“authorized”
OTAs to link to the carrier’s content.