An updatefrom the Ryanair website:
Bravofly Ltd Discontinues Screenscraping Ryanair.com
RYANAIR TO CANCEL ALL SCREENSCRAPER BOOKINGS
Ryanair, Europe’s largest low fares airline today (5th August) announced that BravoFly Ltd (an Irish screenscraping price comparison website) has confirmed that it has discontinued screenscraping the Ryanair.com website as part of legal proceedings filed against both it and its parent company BravoFly SA. This is the second recent success Ryanair has scored against screenscraping websites and follows Ryanair’s successful injunction against V-tours to prevent them from screenscraping Ryanair’s website in Germany.
Ryanair has a policy of preventing screenscrapers unlawfully accessing Ryanair’s website, because in many cases these screenscrapers are engaged in some or all of the following unlawful/inappropriate behaviour:
1. They are in breach of Ryanair’s copyright rules.
2. They are in breach of Ryanair.com’s terms of use.
3. They are levying unjustified and unnecessary handling charges (in some cases up to double the Ryanair fare) on Ryanair passengers.
4. They don’t provide passengers with Ryanair’s accurate terms/conditions.
5. They don’t provide passengers with up to date flight or change information.
6. They are delaying ordinary passengers’ access to the Ryanair.com website.
Commenting on this latest success against screenscrapers, Ryanair’s Howard Millar said:
“We welcome this latest success against screenscrapers, as we continue our campaign to eliminate this unlawful activity from the Ryanair website. Ryanair is pursuing legal actions in a number of European countries to bring an end to this unlawful and anti-consumer activity.
“Many of these screenscrapers do not provide consumers with any useful services, because consumers know that they will get the lowest fares only on Ryanair.com, thanks to Ryanair’s lowest fare guarantee. However, in recent weeks genuine passengers using Ryanair’s website have been suffering long processing times and slower access because of the huge volume of information being downloaded from our website by these screenscrapers all over Europe. In all cases this scraping activity is unlawful and in breach of both Ryanair.com’s copyright and terms of use.
“We are determined to eliminate these illegal practices, particularly in cases where passengers are being misled by screenscrapers into paying higher fares, unjustified handling fees and hotel and car hire charges that are higher than they otherwise would be on Ryanair.com.
“Ryanair will next Monday (11th Aug) introduce new procedures to cancel all passenger bookings made through screenscraping websites. We believe this is a quicker and more effective way of discouraging this unlawful activity and we hope that by getting rid of screenscrapers we will speed up passenger processing times on Ryanair.com, as well as ensuring that Ryanair passengers are not paying unnecessary handling charges or higher fares to screenscrapers. Ryanair is continuing to work with our software providers, Navitaire and Microsoft to proactively eliminate screenscraping of Ryanair’s website. We hope this will ensure that genuine consumers can purchase Europe’s guaranteed lowest air fares while enjoying rapid access and quicker processing times for their bookings on Ryanair.com”.