Blog homeRyanair have now published their list of 300 or so travel websites who they have sent cease and desist letters to as a result of screenscraping.
You can find the full list in this PDF document on the Ryanair website
Anyway, I thought I would have a go at picking out a few notable names:
- Cheapflights
- Opodo.com
- Priceline.com
- Lastminute.com (various sites)
- Travelocity
- Yahoo (various sites)
- eBookers
- Tesco (!)
- Skyscanner.net
- Kelkoo
- Dohop
- Mobissimo
- Sidestep
- Kayak
- TravelSupermarket
- TravelRepublic
- OTBeach
- OnHolidayGroup
- Bravofly
- ActiveHotels
And some travel technology providers
- Dolphin Dynamics
- Click with Technology
- Galileo
- Amadeus
Just because you are on this list this doesn’t mean that the tickets are being cancelled….. but it certainly should be a bit of a “red flag”.
If you are NOT on the full list it probably means you are not trying hard enough! Keep up at the back!
Reading the trade press recently there has been a great deal of space given to travel agents complaining about the new Ryanair tactics. Actually, looking at the list, it is nearly every major online travel player that has received a legal letter….. therefore the agents who are doing the complaining (who are mainly conventional offline ones) should probably be happy that Ryanair is taking some action against online players!
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Hi Alex,
We own up to NOT screescraping Ryanair website. All we show are routes which are flown by Ryanair and we get that information manually.
We were thus even more surprised when on 18 January 2008 we received a letter from Ryanair saying “We understand that you utilise an automated system to extract flight information (data) from the Ryanair Website for display on your own website and/or to be supplied to a third party for display on its website. This is an actionable breach of contract.” Considering they have no evidence of us using any “automated system”, I guess they just wrote to every website featuring their flight information, be it prices, schedules, or just routes, as is in our case.
We would LOVE Ryanair to take us to court. The PR value we would gain from that would be fantastic. It’s just a shame we don’t do anything illegal.
Regards,
Martino Matijevic
WhichBudget
www.whichbudget.com
Hi Alex,
This list is a joke and aims at attracting media coverage (follow Travolution and co immediate response).
For instance, Booking.com and Active Hotels don’t offer Flights on their website so the screenscraping accusation is a bit flawed.
Ryanair is getting really boring now…surely we could live without it (on business or leisure travel).
Guillaume
Hi Guillaume,
Yes - I think I have posted enough about Ryanair now! (which is why I have just posted a summary!)
Hi Alex,
We (Skyscanner) have just publised a statement in response to this which you can read here: http://news.skyscanner.net/articles/2008/08/000550-skyscanner-and-ryanair-the-cease-and-desist-situation-clarified.html
The gist of our statement, is that, yes - Skyscanner were issued a cease and desist order, but this was several months ago, and Ryanair have since approved us to show their flights, seeing as we don’t act as middlemen, but send users directly to Ryanair’s website to book their flights.
Ryanair spokesman, Stephen McNamara, has also publicly stated that Skyscanner is okay to use, and said Ryanair does not have a problem with the site.
thanks
Skyscanner
Alex,
Let’s extraplolate from Skyscanner’s comment:
Scraping is okay, if intended to show, promote, maybe compare flights with other offers, but it is not okay when it is used for unauthorized re-selling (with those large mark-ups they talk about).
That makes sense to me. Why would Ryanair object as long as the booking is made on their site - and they have the opportunity to market all sorts of (real) money makers to their customers.
Michael