Peace has broken out in Ryanair’s ongoing battle with online travel agents, on some fronts anyway. The Irish airline said on Monday that it had agreed a partnership with Kiwi.com, with which it recently clashed in court, while it already has a deal with Loveholidays.
Michael O’Leary, its chief executive, told analysts on Monday that more could follow, as the airline was in talks with the top eight or 10 such agents. The only one he ruled out was Booking.com. Ryanair is suing that company in the US and Mr O’Leary indicated it was unlikely to settle the case.
Never afraid to litigate, Ryanair has taken online travel agents to court plenty of times, mostly accusing them of screen scraping, that is selling its flights on their websites, and then adding extra fees to the airline’s own prices. More recently, it has taken to publishing a monthly league table detailing examples of overcharging by agents.
It has also added an extra customer verification process for anyone who has booked flights through an unauthorised agent. For their part, the online businesses have accused the airline of trying to stymie competition and several of them stopped selling its flights in December.
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The deals with Loveholidays and Kiwi.com are conditional on the agents selling the airline’s flights and extras at its prices and on giving it the customers’ details, so it can communicate with those passengers directly. That also means they will not have to go through the extra verification process.
From its early rows with traditional high street travel agents, Ryanair has always worked to maintain control over how its flights are sold to customers, which is obviously what its deals with Kiwi.com and Loveholidays are meant to do. As Mr O’Leary said on Monday, Ryanair does not want a situation, like that in the hotel business, where someone else “inserts themselves” between the airline and its customers, and ultimately starts charging the group for selling its flights. “We cannot afford that, airlines are a low-margin business,” he told analysts.
