Ryanair: If You Buy from a 3rd Party Site, We May Cancel Your Ticket
Aug 11th, 2008 | By Jared BlankRyanair is taking a rather harsh stand against so-called Screenscraping Sites that search its site for fares. The airline now says that it will cancel the tickets of anyone who books through a third-party site that screenscrapes. As it would be rather difficult for you (the traveler) to know how a third-party site is accessing Ryanair’s fares, your best bet will be to just go to Ryanair’s website to buy tickets. This doesn’t affect most people – Ryanair says that less than 1% of its tickets are sold in this manner – but it’s rare to see an airline retaliate against consumers when they’re unhappy with 3rd party distribution (for example, American is now taking Kayak to court for how it displays their fares).
I generally search for fares on search sites (travelocity, expedia, tripmela, etc) and then buy from the airline directly that has the cheapest fare as doing so is (usually) 5-10 bucks cheaper. This wouldn’t affect me, right?
This is basically blocking the “free” flight to got to FLL via travelocity, right?
Ryanair isn’t available on regular online travel agency sites – a number of “screenscraping” sites have popped up that were getting their fares, and that’s who Ryanair has a problem with. And unless you were planning on flying Ryanair, this won’t affect you.
The AA/Kayak thing only affects Kayak (ie, AA fares are no longer available there)