Ryanair news and Cheapoair.com replacement deals
Yesterday, Europe was buzzing about the impending cancellation of thousands of Ryanair tickets that have been purchased through websites other than Ryanair.com. Michael O’Leary, the CEO of Ryanair claimed that screen scrapers were illegally selling his airline’s tickets and systems trespassed on his server bandwidth slowing the booking process for legitimate customers.
Ryanair has been involved in long court cases about this issue. They have prevailed regularly, however the screenscraping continues. O’Leary decided that the best way to handle the problem was to throw it back at the illegal booking sites.
Needless to say, the weeping and wailing was loud in the media and with consumer agencies in Britain and Europe. But I have not read of any tickets not being honored in the newspapers, on news websites or in blogs this morning. Either the problems were minimal or Ryanair pulled back from the brink after making their point.
One site that complied back in May with Ryanair’s request that they stop selling airline tickets through screen scraping, Cheapoair.com, has launched a non-Ryanair sale that offers travelers a 15 percent bargain for airline tickets on competing airlines.
According to a Cheapoair press release: “CheapOair announces $15 discounts for all U.S. or Canadian passengers who book any Ryanair route on other carriers through CheapOair.com. CheapOair is also launching a new page on Tues., Aug. 12, listing all the routes eligible for the discount . To receive the discount, customers should enter promo code SAVE15EUR upon checkout. CheapOair is one of the few OTAs that allow users to book non-U.S. originating flights.”
In other developments, Ryanair just announced a series of price reductions aimed at capturing competing airlines’ routes and landing slots as they pull back in the face of high fuel prices. Ryanair can pursue this course because they have “a killer balance sheet, a comfortable store of cash.”
You may also be interested in these articles
Comments
One Response to “Ryanair news and Cheapoair.com replacement deals”
Please share your thoughts...
I’ve been a long-time supporter of low cost airlines and I’m not personally involved in any way, but I believe Ryanair has got it completely wrong this time.
First of all, customers were not warned in any way of this possible mishap; they subscribed to what is defined as a transportation contract in Italian (my country, where about 12.000 people are thought to have this type of ticket) and European law in good faith, and there is no “force majeur” which can justify Ryanair’s cancellation of their tickets as they are. Ryanair should have stopped accepting bookings, as they can easily trace the source of the booking, not accepted and then cancel the tickets.
Second, according to European law, Ryanair may have to fork out much more than they think they are going to have to do, as far as I can see: actually, they’ll have to reimburse whatever cost, loss of earning, loss of holiday time, stress-derivated damage, and lots of other possible damage, their clients are incurring. They don’t have a court-order nor any type of official decision about this, and therefore no judge would ever consider their decision as acceptable.
I know that their idea is not about unofficial tickets - it’s all about cancelling flights which they consider unprofitable and too costly, but they can’t officially cancel out of the blue, or at the very best, these flights are on a over-overbooking (a travel agent in Italy said that from some calculations, Ryanair has probably sold around three times the number of available seats on these flights). But I think they are going to have to back up on this one.