Ryanair said it has sealed an agreement with Booking.com and other travel brands in the Booking group, including Kayak, Priceline and Agoda.
It gives customers with the online travel sites access to Ryanair’s flights across its network.
Booking.com only sold between 13,489 and 33,205 Ryanair fights per year to US consumers over a four-year period, the airline noted last year in a US court filing. That compares to the 200.2 million passengers Ryanair carried in the 12 months to the end of March this year.
Ryanair already has deals with online travel firms such as Lastminute, Expedia and Kiwi that allows them to resell the airline’s flights on their websites to customers.
Today’s News in 90 Seconds – August 26th
Now customers who book Ryanair flights through Booking.com, Kayak, Priceline and Agoda will have access to their myRyanair account without needing to complete Ryanair’s customer verification, which ensures they will receive essential flight updates directly.
The carrier, headed by group chief executive Michael O’Leary, has previously been at loggerheads with online travel agents that sold seats on Ryanair’s flights via their own websites.
Ryanair sued Booking Holdings and subsidiaries including Booking.com in the United States in 2020 over alleged screen-scraping of its fares by the firms.
Screen-scraping involves a third party accessing an airline’s website and often offering that airline’s fares to its own customers via its own website.
In its US lawsuit, Ryanair claimed damages against Booking.com, arguing that it has incurred costs to tackle the travel agents’ “unauthorised” access of the website.
After a trial in July last year, a jury in Delaware convicted Booking.com of having caused economic harm to Ryanair. The jury awarded the Irish airline just $5,000 (€4,274) – the minimum threshold required to state a claim under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
However, the district court judge who heard the case then agreed with Booking.com that Ryanair had not met the requirement of proving that at least $5,000 of loss was attributable to the website, which is a prerequisite to any finding of civil liability under the CFAA.
Accordingly, the judge overturned the ruling. Ryanair then initiated an appeal against that decision.
Importantly, the Delaware court also interpreted the law as meaning that if a site-scraper is told that the same information is available as a registered user, and is issued a cease-and-desist letter, it must stop its activities.
That prompted three lobby groups to weigh in behind Booking.com in Ryanair’s appeal against last year’s ruling.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that defends “digital privacy, free speech and innovation” argued that Ryanair is attempting to stymie competition. Ryanair had unsuccessfully tried to persuade the US Court of Appeals not to permit the lobby groups to file briefs in support of Booking.com.
However, the Irish Independent reported this week that Ryanair and Booking.com have mutually agreed to end the appeals process.
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