Alex Bainbridge's Musings on travel ecommerce blog
Musings on travel ecommerce blog
Blog home  Blog home

Ryanair site to be down for 3 days?

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

According to Travel Weekly, Ryanair’s website will be down for 3 days while they make some pricing changes to their website (between Feb 16th and 18th) (Ryanair are an Ireland based low cost airline)

Read the Travel Weekly article

I have no inside knowledge of how Ryanair run their website but 3 days? Are they serious? That is rather a long time.

I can only think of a couple of reasons why a site would need to be down for 3 days……

  • They are making a political point about how hard it has been to comply with the new website upfront pricing legislation….. but taking it to this extreme would be a bit much
  • They are making a significant DNS change to their domain name…… but even then – this could have been handled is a faster way (I expect)
  • They are making a significant reservation system change – and may be having to transfer old data from one system to another and then manually auditing the data transfer (when you have to transfer live data, often these changes have to be sequential and not done ahead of time)
  • They have to reload pricing in a different way to how they currently load pricing – and this price load can’t be done in an offline system – only the live online system – but if they make the changes to live loaded prices prior to corresponding functionality changes on their website something breaks or causes user confusion.

Somehow there must be some manual process to cause a 3 day delay. My bet is on the 4th – which is probably why they have taken so long to get around to this project.

If I am right, the process will be something like this:

  1. Take system down
  2. Change loaded prices in live reservation system (manual process – could take a long time)
  3. Upload new website functionality that corresponds to new style of loaded prices
  4. Put system back up

Ummm……. At this stage I would start to look at a DataLoad – a mechanism to systematically upload data into any application – even legacy green screen applications….. if you could cut down the manual load process to a couple of hours this could get their site up after 24 hours (perhaps!). You can also do “trial runs” prior to the changeover event to ensure everything will go smoothly.

If someone from Ryanair thinks I have saved them a few million dollars in lost sales with this tip, please send contributions to me (and corresponding self-bill invoice). Thanks





More posts (maybe related, maybe not)


6 Responses to “Ryanair site to be down for 3 days?”


  1. February 15th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
    Mark Lenahan

    I don’t work directly with Ryanair but from my knowledge of airline CRSs I think it is the third option.

    A change from openskies to newskies is significant, also there’ll be a sizeable data migration (I’d guess about 300,000 bookings – manual load is out of the question, there are almost certainly automated tools but I think they will simply take time to run or some percentage of bookings requires some manual intervention).

    I’m not sure what you said about pricing holds true, in most airlines the prices lists are surprisingly static, and could in theory be loaded before cut over. Prices don’t appear static to consumers because any one flight could have dozens of price points. The dynamic nature of Ryanair pricing comes from the way yield/revenue management controls the inventory.

    Or maybe I misunderstood your point…

  2. February 15th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
    Mark Lenahan

    Sorry, did I say 300,000? I should have said 2 million!
    (Based on 50m PBs per anum, avg 2 PBs per PNR, and an avg booking lifetime of about 1 month = very rough guess)

  3. February 15th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
       Alex Bainbridge

    Hi Mark
    Thanks for commenting

    When I said price reloading I thought that maybe their prices work like so

    - base price
    - flexible incremental price
    - taxes & whatnot

    Where the base price remains static but the flexible price, well, flexes.

    I thought that maybe they were moving the relationship between what was in their static pricing vs what was in their flexible component. However now I understand it is a system change – therefore, yes, 3rd is more likely.

    I know what you mean re yield for flights…. and price or class based yield – or a bucket approach…. I don’t know what Ryanair do though. Probably a form of bucket. (I have never had hands on use with Navitaire – but have worked at airlines that use it….)

    Dataload tool I mentioned still takes a time to run….. In my experience using it we got about 5x times performance of a fully utilised human…. You are restricted from running at top speed because the systems behind the scenes are having to process the new data …. and have been optimsied to process around what is OK for a human to wait for…. not to handle x hundred thousand in a short period….. (which is why all this all takes time, of course). Dataload doesn’t need coffee breaks though.

  4. February 27th, 2008 at 9:50 am
    cpfd

    Since Ryanair revamped their website….disaster!!
    It takes ages to search for flights now ( I have a broadband connection)
    Website loads ok ..but try searching and its like using a dialup connection!!

  5. February 29th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
    John

    Well, at least no one got hurt.

  6. May 1st, 2008 at 5:06 am
       Colt Cooper

    They were indeed upgrading their reservation system from OpenSkies to NewSkies. This was about a year in the works and it didn’t come off without some hitches. I actually implement NewSkies reservation systems, and I know first hand how difficult it is to roll out a conversion the size of Ryan’s (millions of bookings is accurate). They have recently gotten an update or two from their vendor to address those a few of the stability problems.

    We’ve been watching the site from across the pond here in the US and have noticed small intermittent outages everyday. One can only hope they can get this under control.

Leave a Reply



Latest from Small Fish Big Ocean

Got a question about travel ecommerce? Come and ask in our forums!



This blog is about travel ecommerce & travel social media with a focus on topics of interest to tour operators & B2C travel companies

Alex has previously started up a small tour operator (5 staff) and also worked for leading "dot coms", airlines, hotel chains and tour operators advising and project managing web, ecommerce, social media and reservation system projects.

We operate TourCMS - a web based reservation system for small tour operators


Main feed
RSS Feed

Comments feed
RSS Feed

Subscribe via daily email



TwitterCounter for @alexbainbridge



Homepage
About this blog
Best of the blog (top 10 posts!)

Recent comments
Spence: Nice idea, but that name rocks! Can’t believe its still available, can just see the logo now…

Spence: Best of luck over at Tnooz!

Dan Hodgins: Hi Alex, Here’s what sticks out for me in your post. 1. Travel marketing is a two-step process * Generate consumer desire for the city/destination * Once desire is generated, make your version of...

Brent Van Allen: The OTA standard has some good and bad to it like any standard. The main detraction I would think is that it is oriented only towards booking request/response standardization. It does have some coding...

Acai: Good luck Alex!

Laura: Interesting point on screen scrapers, For screen scrapers i use python for simple things, but for larger projects i used extractingdata.com screen scraper software which worked great, they build custom screen...

alisa reese: Good article this is valuable info as you need to zoom in on what is important to yout client. We offer specialized tours. Our theme is “make the experience uniquely your own” we find it to be...

Kerry: Hi Did anyone find any solutions to this issue, in particular with regards to booking cancellations/refunds and ammendments?

Kevin Evans: Great discussion. Interestingly Vtravelled have contracted NeoOptic for SEO for who knows how much money (budget seems to be a non-issue, hence deals also with Attik and Vexed). But, doing a simple...

Categories
Top commentators

Other travel & tourism blogs
Tnooz
The Boot
Hotel Blogs
Dennis Schaal
TraveBlather
Travolution
Albert Barra [Spanish]

Wiwih blogs - a directory of travel industry blogs

Small Fish Big Ocean

Come and join our forums for small tour operators and niche agents


TourCMS



Tnooz