If you’ve recently booked a trip on Ryanair through third-party sites such as lastminute.com, tui, vtours, and Opodo, you may need to rebook your trip.
Ryanair announced on Thursday that it would cancel any bookings made on third-party sites such as those mentioned above. It would affect anyone traveling after Monday. Since 1,000 people per day use these unapproved websites to book flights, it could cause as many as 20,000 people to lose their tickets if bookings were made 20 days in advance.
Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, said that the airline will give refunds to the websites, but it’s up to the websites concerned whether they will pass on the refunds to the customers. “We want to cause as much chaos for the [websites] as possible,” he said.
Consumers Association vice chairman Michael Kilcoyne said that Ryanair’s position is totally unreasonable.
The customer has made those bookings in good faith. If they have to now make new bookings at the last minute they could end up paying ten times as much.
This is just Ryanair’s way of extracting more money from customers, it seems the airline can do whatever they like and no-one can stop them.
A spokesman for Ryanair confirmed that the airline has taken legal advice on the move and is well within its rights. O’Leary feels that he is just trying to save the passengers money. He feels that the websites are “stiffing” its users because the prices are higher than those at ryanair.com.
In a statement, Consumers Association countered, “The real issue here in our view is that Ryanair is concerned about losing out on the sale of other services such as travel insurance, hotels, car hire and to stop this they want to prevent consumers from using comparison websites.”
Airlines, particularly those on the other side of the pond, will be watching this with great interest, particular American Airlines. Already American is suing Kayak and Sidestep over fare displays. This may be their next step with similar sites such as Orbitz or Travelocity.
Southwest Airlines already tightly controls its flight inventory. Their seats may only be booked on the web through southwest.com.
