Image by Digital Explorer, some rights reserved
A significant announcement happened last week in the world of online travel. It could have gone unnoticed, but not by those who are closely monitoring the screen-scraping saga of the budget flights giants, Ryanair and Easyjet, and the folks that want to sell their tickets. The announcement was that Ryanair have now decided to allow scraping of their site under particular circumstances for a “charitable donation” of 100 Euros per year. Perhaps this is a case of if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em?
For those that are less familiar with the context of this announcement, here is some history:
- In the months leading up to July 2008 the number of sites scraping budget airline sites was rapidly increasing. [Scraping = automated extraction of information from a website by a computer that is simulating human exploration]. Sites performing the scraping were gathering fares for price comparison and some were executing bookings on the carriers’ websites directly.
- Ryanair and Easyjet became very aware of this upward trend and were concerned about the impact on the speed of their sites for real customers. They objected vehemently to certain types of scraping. Mainly those sites that were misrepresenting the original prices by whacking on their own commission and particularly to those sites that booked tickets on behalf of users, deterring them from ever visiting the carriers’ sites directly (and potentially buying extras).
- Ryanair’s official claim was that certain scrapers violated the terms of its sites which state that “no third party can make commercial use of [the Ryanair] website”. Ryanair issued a complaint to the European Commission and official warning letters to around 300 sites. They later took up legal action against companies including Bravofly.
- On 11th August 2008 Ryanair had the rest of the online travel industry up in arms when they introduced a controversial new policy to cancel tickets bought on third party websites
- Attempting to make some peace, on 2nd September 2008 Ryanair offered an olive branch to certain ‘metasearch sites’ that were scraping Ryanair sites at low volume, purely for price comparison purposes. Skyscanner was singled out as a golden child and Ryanair issued a specific statement granting approval to them.
- Easyjet meanwhile developed and encouraged the use of their API, which removes the need to scrape and even enables booking (on their terms). They are still fighting battles with sites that refuse to cooperate with their ‘official channel’.
No doubt Ryanair will continue to fight scrapers that place unusually high demands on their servers, display their prices at inflated values and/or attempt to book on their site. However last week’s announcement is significant as Ryanair are warming to a broader range of price comparison sites that represent them fairly and ultimately will drive real traffic to their site. One wonders whether the Ryanair ‘charitable donation’ will be put towards loo subsidies for their poorer passengers or to a more worthwhile cause…
For the record, Zoombu represents all prices accurately and does not add any commission to any fares. Furthermore, if you want to book any component, we send you to the carriers’ site to make the purchase directly from them.
Posted by Rachel
