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Ryanair takes travel website to court
06 July 2008 By David Clerkin
Ryanair has instigated legal action against a travel website to prevent it from using Ryanair’s booking engine to sell flights online.
The airline has taken a case through the Commercial Court in Dublin alleging that Bravofly, an Amsterdam-headquartered company with offices in Dublin, Switzerland and Italy, takes information from the Ryanair website in a manner counter to the published terms and conditions for its use.
Ryanair’s terms and conditions seek to restrict the ability to make flight bookings on its website to individual passengers only. It is understood to be against the practice of ‘‘screen scraping’’, cases where other websites piggy-back off an airline’s booking infrastructure to offer flights to customers without using the airline’s website directly.
Bravofly offers users of its websites the ability to search prices and timetables on routes operated by a number of airlines, allowing them to compare flight prices between airlines and on different dates.
It generates income by charging users an administrative fee of up to €10 on top of the price charged by the relevant airline.
Ryanair’s website accounts for almost all of its bookings. Chief executive Michael O’Leary has set ambitious targets for driving ancillary revenues through the website by encouraging users to avail of other services when booking Ryanair flights. These include hotel rooms, car hire, travel insurance, credit cards and gambling.
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