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Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

arghwhat
93 replies
1d9h

A jury in the District Court of Delaware unanimously found that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse act and that it had induced a third party to access parts of Ryanair's website without authorisation "with an intent to defraud," the verdict said

I imagine this is limited to a scenario where you: 1. Act as a middle-man for the transaction (as this lawsuit was about resale), 2. Interfere with pricing or other service aspects, 3. Add your own profit. I don't think this sets any precedent against scraping on its own.

(The highly variable and discriminatory pricing of travel would also best be addressed in regulation, rather than relying entirely on third-party resellers to rescue you.)

SoftTalker
44 replies
1d4h

We used to regulate air travel. It was a lot more expensive then.

arghwhat
26 replies
1d3h

And you still regulate it, just differently.

The implied conclusion that regulation makes things expensive is wrong, and comparing the air travel market over half a century ago with the market today, and crediting a change made in 1978 for the difference doesn’t make sense.

EU air travel is quite regulated with e.g. consumer rights for cash compensation, hotel and food service in case of delay, and yet air travel reached a point some years before covid where some providers played with the thought of having tickets be free - the main source of income for the airlines was in duty-free on either end of the journey anyway, so more travelers meant more revenue even if their tickets were zero.

Disallowing discriminatory and unfair business practices is not the same as having the government set travel prices.

jermaustin1
11 replies
1d3h

Flying budget air carriers is already so incredibly cheap in the EU. It is cheaper to fly from Belfast to London, than it is to fly Houston to Austin (half the distance) or Houston to New Orleans (roughly the same distance).

I wish the US could figure that out.

piltdownman
4 replies
1d3h

RyanAir used to fly to Morocco, and it was often cheaper to go Dublin -> Marrakesh than it was to get a plane or train from London to Manchester.

Lot of it comes down to individual airports and fees. Part of the reason that RyanAir flies into Buvais rather than CDG or Orly when you fly with them to 'Paris', or that other joke airport they use instead of Berlin.

thinkindie
1 replies
1d2h

Ryanair flies to Berlin. Even before the new airport, they were flying to Schoenefeld which was just outside the city limits. In fact, the old airport was just across the runaways of the new one and you can still reach the old terminal building with the commuter train. Schoenefeld was the old East Berlin airport, which was indeed suboptimal for the load of travellers it got over time.

pimeys
0 replies
20h50m

The are going to renovate Schönefeld and make it a private airport for German politicians. I guess the project will be ready in 20-30 years...

isoprophlex
0 replies
1d2h

A pilot friend who flew for ryanair showed me around control tower of Frankfurt Hahn (hint: nowhere near the real frankfurt) some ten years ago. We were shooting the shit with the controllers as a private jet plane came in on the radio, asking permission to land. After some back and forth they discovered this was the fake frankfurt, and eventually didn't come in for landing. That got a good chuckle from everyone...

ghaff
0 replies
1d2h

In general, European air travel is often pretty cheap relative to trains. Varies enormously though.

AlchemistCamp
3 replies
10h36m

Houston to Austin only takes a couple of hours to drive. Flying would be slower, more hassle, way more polluting and more cramped.

arghwhat
2 replies
9h24m

Heh, reminds me of the saying: An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time.

Houston to Austin seems to take 50 minutes by flight vs. 2 hours and 30 minutes by car. That's not the best convenience ratio for a domestic flight (going between the two largest cities in Denmark is 40 minutes by air vs. over 3 hours by car), and it's certainly more expensive...

However, whether it's more polluting actually depends on a lot of things. Comparing a fully booked, modern commercial passenger plane vs. a car carrying a single person usually has the airplane coming out on top (heh). A modern car with all seats occupied beats the airplane though.

(A naturally aspirated V8 without direct fuel injection leads to a divide by zero in any efficiency calculations.)

AlchemistCamp
1 replies
5h44m

Just remember to leave early enough to arrive at the airport 90 minutes before your scheduled departure time ;)

gottorf
0 replies
3h13m

And don't forget to factor in that IAH is a 20 mile drive from downtown Houston, and AUS is another 10 miles to downtown Austin! (Combined, that's about 1/5 of the driving distance between the two cities.)

1659447091
1 replies
7h0m

Houston <-> Austin is a business flyer route. That's why it's so expensive and you can get a flight every ~30mins or so throughout the day.

You can also fly Austin<>LA/Denver for 1/3-1/2 the cost Houston<>Austin. I've flown to Canada (from Tx) for less than a Houston/Austin (or Austin/Houston<>Dallas) flight.

These routes are where high-speed trains would excel...if one could get past the airline lobby

StillBored
0 replies
3h13m

Austin, isn't representative of anything except a confluence of factors combined with stupidity.

First, its a ~30 min flight to Houston, and a ~40 min flight to Dallas, two of the largest and busiest hub airports in the USA. So, a massive amount of american/united Austin traffic is Austin->IAH/DFW->destination if your not flying southwest with a direct route. Yes, there are a number of direct routes to other places, particularly large hubs (DEN/ATL/JFK/etc) but its like once a day or every other day for non hub airports.

But that pattern is doubly reinforced through local decisions which have resulted in ABIA being the number #1 airport in the USA for flights per gate.

AKA, by gate count it has the highest utilization of any airport in the USA, and this is the result of the anti-growth politics for the past 40+ years, that did things like move the airport from Mueller, to ABIA while initially planning on having the same number of gates as Mueller, and only relenting and adding 4 (IIRC) more. And keep in mind that Mueller was frequently like going to a crowded standing room only bar. And not only was ABIA undersized but it wasn't designed for serious expansion. And really, there wasn't any excuse when one looks at any airport designed in the past half century its obvious where the terminal expansion is planned (ex:DFW) with the better designed airports like TPA/MCO using a hub and spoke model. Instead what Austin is going to get is an ad-hoc expansions which will result in Heathrow levels of suck (and its already that way for the south terminal, where one has to leave the airport, drive for 10 mins and then re-enter).

IG_Semmelweiss
8 replies
1d

Can you cite examples of any industry or niche , anywhere in the world, that was newly regulated, and once regulation tool place, prices materially dropped?

Geniuinely curious.

nickpsecurity
2 replies
23h40m

Everything about regulating Big Telecom. They didn’t want to run lines to people, drop long distance, increase broadband speed, etc. Each time, the behavior was countered by regulation or the threat of it.

Splitting MA Bell into the Baby Bells also helped for a while. Then, they started merging back together. Then, the oligopolies made service worse again.

If left on their own, they collude to do a minimum form of competition while cooperating on profitable ways to cheat customers. That’s called cartels. It’s as big a threat to the free market as governments.

dantheman
1 replies
23h13m

What are you talking about - that is deregulation. This was a government granted monopoly - you don't get more regulated than that.

nickpsecurity
0 replies
15h36m

They broke a private company into many competing companies. Then, at various times, they forced the companies to serve customers in ways they were simply unwilling to. They’d tell lies why it couldn’t be done. After regulation or threat of it, they rapidly accomplished what they previously couldn’t.

A recent example that isn’t regulation so much as revealing was Google Fiber vs established telecoms. The established companies had low speeds on purpose in many areas. They couldn’t do better. After Google Fiber hit, we’d sometimes see a comparable offering show up in just that area very quickly. As in, they could’ve done it the whole time but refused to soak up more profit.

That’s the kind of abuse that regulation is supposed to deal with. Whereas, the breakup was using regulation to force the companies to operate like a free market. That’s often necessary because the companies will make more profit if they collude to cheat customers. Or workers as we saw in the wage scheme in Silicon Valley.

pixelatedindex
0 replies
10h6m

And now CA has gone full circle with how PG&E rules the roost over here. Outside of a few places, it’s very much a monopoly.

nicoburns
0 replies
16h33m

Card payments are regulated in the EU, and prices are much cheaper. Contrast that with New Zealand where there is often a 2.5% surcharge on credit card and contactless payments.

TylerE
0 replies
1d

Internet access after the telcos were forced to share their last mile fibre?

NohatCoder
0 replies
1d

Telephone roaming charges in the EU.

shiroiushi
2 replies
18h17m

Maybe the answer is for the US government to not regulate these things, but instead somehow allow the EU to regulate them on US soil. (No, I have no idea how that would work legally.)

Because when the EU regulates things like this, the result is usually pretty good. But when the US regulates things, it turns into regulatory capture and only helps the big corporations at the expense of everyone else.

It's a bit like unions: Americans complain about how bad labor unions are, because in the US they didn't work out very well at all. But Europeans like unions, because over there they seem to work pretty well. So obviously, the US just can't do unions properly, just like they can't do a lot of regulation properly (see: FAA/Boeing).

nicoburns
1 replies
16h36m

And of course it's circular:

The US doesn't do things like well because Americans don't trust their institutions and think governments are inherently corrupt and ineffective, so they think might as well join in (and then perpetuate that corruption/ineffectiveness).

shiroiushi
0 replies
14h33m

think governments are inherently corrupt and ineffective, so they think might as well join in (and then perpetuate that corruption/ineffectiveness).

Sounds like the way countries typically considered "corrupt" probably work. But for some reason, Americans don't like to think of their country as being as corrupt as someplace like [random central American country], despite evidence to the contrary.

yawnxyz
0 replies
1d3h

I think they just want to bring back smoking on planes

Wytwwww
0 replies
1d

having tickets be free - the main source of income for the airlines was in duty-free on either end of the journey anyway

I'm sure that was pretty far-fetched and not something actually viable. Considering duty-free isn't even a thing for most Ryanair/other cheap airline flights because they are inside the EU.

xienze
7 replies
1d2h

We used to regulate air travel. It was a lot more expensive then.

I'm not sure this is the gotcha you think it is. Air travel, even in coach, was downright luxury compared to where it is today, and I'm not even talking about in the distant past, I'm talking about 25 or so years ago. Seats are narrower, legroom is practically nonexistent, and the seats only recline like two inches these days. Also almost everything is a la carte.

Wytwwww
2 replies
1d

Exactly. You can still fly businesses and pay the same price as before, it just became massively more accessible than before,

Marsymars
1 replies
22h15m

You can still fly businesses and pay the same price as before

You can't really though - e.g. 25 years ago you could fly economy from Vancouver Canada to Sydney Australia for $2600. (Inflation adjusted.) You can now do that flight for $1400. Pretty good, but the kicker is that flying business class is now $5300. Even premium economy is $4400. (Prices are all the cheapest I see on Google Flights over the rest of 2024, so some of them are limited to very specific dates.)

Probably the most equivalent price to 25 years ago is basic economy plus paying for a meal, snack, checked bag and selection of an exit row seat, but today's premium economy is probably the most equivalent service level to yesterday's basic economy.

felixg3
0 replies
44m

Very interesting. A flight from Europe to Sydney, for example, is 1150€ round trip.

shiroiushi
1 replies
18h14m

Air travel in coach is still not too bad as long as you take an international flight. The US domestic flights, however, are truly awful.

vidarh
0 replies
12h29m

I stopped over in Newark once on the way to SFO from Europe. Never again. The domestic flight from Newark to SFO was such a nightmare I'd much rather do the full 11 hours direct on a Transatlantic flight.

fermisea
0 replies
23h46m

So you believe poor people shouldn't be allowed to travel?

WillPostForFood
0 replies
1d2h

You already have the choice to pay more to upgrade to better seats/experience. If I value price over luxury, why would you want take that choice from me? There is no world where we regulate first class for everyone but at basic economy prices.

Sohcahtoa82
1 replies
1d1h

How much of that "fuel per passenger" metric comes from simply packing passengers tighter?

Retric
0 replies
21h8m

On net close to 0. Roughly 50% the cargo holds of passenger aircraft are now taken up by air freight which adds quite a bit of drag and isn’t part of those comparisons and offsets the reduction in passenger legroom.

That freight also helps explain why nearly empty flights can make sense economically.

Der_Einzige
2 replies
1d3h

Most of what makes travel shitty is that simply far too many people are traveling. I do think it’s better for the world for less travel to happen in general, so I fully support this.

rangestransform
1 replies
1d1h

Alright, you first

maeil
0 replies
21h50m

I've been doing it, now you join.

snowpid
0 replies
6h9m

Very good example for American centrism. Esspecially as Ryan Air is only operates in Europe.

ryanisnan
0 replies
13h20m

According to a recent video by 74gear, airline prices have for the past many-years been heavily subsidized by credit card deals airlines sell.

Apparently this part of the biz is taking a bit of a nosedive, and he expects airline prices to skyrocket to compensate for the loss in revenue.

mschuster91
23 replies
1d7h

and that it had induced a third party to access parts of Ryanair's website without authorisation "with an intent to defraud," the verdict said

Where was the "defraud" happening here? When Ryanair wants to make money on flights they shouldn't offer flight tickets that only make money when they can lure the consumer to purchase addons via a boatload of dark patterns.

For me as someone looking to book a flight, bookingcom acts as a user agent in my service so why should Ryanair have any legal basis on preventing bookingcom from doing so?!

Side note: Where is a service where I can just enter from/to which city/airport I want to fly (or in Europe also rail), what luggage and passengers I carry, and it spits me out the cheapest price offered for the route and sells me the ticket(s) without having to create individual accounts, spread payment info around and try to fight myself through a shitton of dark patterns, broken English and constantly changing UIs? I know this shit is possible, travel agents live and breathe for that stuff, but I'd like to do that myself instead of getting upselled by the travel agent. Rail and flight should be dumb pipes.

arghwhat
7 replies
1d6h

Where was the "defraud" happening here? When Ryanair wants to make money on flights they shouldn't offer flight tickets that only make money when they can lure the consumer to purchase addons via a boatload of dark patterns.

This lawsuit is not about ryanair's pricing model, so that the company engages in bad practices is irrelevant to the court decision. What matters is that booking.com wants to earn money on selling ryanair tickets while evading using reseller agreements by using the site as if they were a private customer (likely also against the terms of service), with supposedly some bad side-effects like ryanair being unable to communicate with the customer (which could be bad if they wanted to e.g. give you a notice about the flight during the sales process).

You will have to sue ryanair specifically about their pricing to get a decision on that, which of course first requires ensuring that it is unlawful or unfair business conduct within your jurisdiction (which it might not be).

bookingcom acts as a user agent in my service so why should Ryanair have any legal basis on preventing bookingcom from doing so?!

They are not your useragent, they are acting as a reseller: You buy a product from them which they acquire elsewhere, taking a profit in the process.

If they were in fact entirely transparent in the process, merely allowing you to purchase the product at the best available price directly (e.g., a plugin to find deals/discounts, VPN to get it from the cheapest region, etc.), then the case would have been hard or impossible for ryanair to make.

mschuster91
4 replies
1d2h

They are not your useragent, they are acting as a reseller: You buy a product from them which they acquire elsewhere, taking a profit in the process.

Yeah so what? Why should anyone, be it a private person or a commercial entity, be restricted from buying something and then re-selling it to another person or entity?

The only thing I'm willing to accept as a restriction for any kind of legal transaction is a reasonable price cap (i.e. no sale above face value of tickets + 5% fees) to get scalpers under control and for security reasons (e.g. name-bound tickets for sports events to prevent hooligans from attending or flight tickets to prevent terrorists from boarding).

But neither applies in this case - flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity that attracts scalpers and the airline has the full set of PNR data.

inopinatus
1 replies
21h40m

Why should anyone ... be restricted from buying something and then re-selling it to another person

because:

flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity

Airline tickets are not a commodity, full stop. They form a contract for a service between the airline and the customer. They're not a bag of fucking apples. Travel agents, when arranging air fares, are agents in the legal sense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency) and not resellers. Booking.com were screwed on that front because they were deceptive in the particulars, a failure of good faith dealing that undermines the claim of agency.

mschuster91
0 replies
5h20m

Airline tickets are not a commodity, full stop.

Why are they not? It's not like there are any airlines beyond oil sheikh owned ones that actually deliver customer service. The only reasonable choice a customer may have is to choose between operators that fly Boeing deathtraps or not.

The commodity is getting transported from A to B, getting treated like shit including getting groped by TSA or its equivalent, and not getting replacement for a bag that's marked as "lost" when it's actually clearly trackable with an AirTag to some bowels of any in-between airport.

WillPostForFood
1 replies
1d2h

flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity that attracts scalpers

If airline ticket resale was as easy as concert tickets, you'd probably see a predatory scalping market develop. Airplane tickets are scarce in that there is limited ability to adjust supply, especially in the short term. If flights to a destination are booked, you can't just throw another plane on the route because the gates are limited and inflexible.

Marsymars
0 replies
22h8m

If airline ticket resale was as easy as concert tickets, you'd probably see a predatory scalping market develop.

I don't think so, because a predatory scalping market only happens when artists are pricing their tickets below the market rate.

Airlines have so such compunction, so they'd just raise their prices until scalpers no longer had a margin opportunity. Or, to put in another way, airline pricing is already as "predatory" as the most aggressive scalping markets.

wodenokoto
1 replies
1d4h

I think parents point is:

It’s only because of Ryan Airs business model of upselling via dark patterns that they care.

And because of these dark patterns, parent as a consumer is willing to pay someone else to go through the booking process and avoid the dark pattern on their behalf.

And the point is good: if company A is annoying to interact with, why can’t you pay company B to do it for you?

SkyBelow
0 replies
1d3h

Isn't the issue that you can do that, but Company A can also add in a clause that you can only do business with us (or with this specific product/website/etc. we offer) if you agree to be buying the tickets for yourself and not for someone else. In which case, if Company B says they are, they are lying.

I think one interesting question from this is what happens when you put an AI in there instead. If Company B sells an AI that Person can use to interact with Company A, at what point does it count as Person's interaction and at what point does it count as Company A's interaction.

Obviously Person is allowed to use technology to interact on behalf of them. They are using Chrome, or IE, or Firefox, etc. This doesn't count as Google/Microsoft/Mozilla interacting with Company A. So on a continuum (likely multi dimensional) from internet browsers to what Booking.com did in this case, including AI somewhere in the continuum space, where is the legal limit?

CaptainZapp
6 replies
1d5h

Where is a service where I can just enter from/to which city/airport I want to fly (or in Europe also rail)

Try momondo.com. You can add # of luggage (checked in & cabin) and play with some other parameters. They won't, or very rarely will, show train connections. They sometimes show bus connections, though.

For train travel I find trainline.com quite good. It gives you an overview over what's available an with which carriers. They are UK focused but offer tickets throughout Europe.

The Man in Seat 61 is (https://www.seat61.com/) is an invaluable resource to inform yourself about train travel. Mostly focused on Europe but covering the world.

Hope this helps.

Edited to add : I use Momondo as an information resource about available carriers and pricing for specific routes. I would never book via an OTA, but strcitly with the airline executing the flight. No matter if it's a few franks more.

If there's any problem with your flight you're up shit creek if you have to deal via a third party.

ghaff
3 replies
1d4h

I much prefer to book directly for air and hotels. If something goes wrong, there's one less level of indirection.

gomox
2 replies
1d4h

On the flip side if something goes wrong you get to discover what $RANDOM_VENDOR in $RANDOM_COUNTRY thinks is a reasonable policy for handling it, which is not usually a big risk for domestic USA travel, but for international travel can be a true wrench in the spokes.

ghaff
1 replies
1d4h

Maybe but if $RANDOM_VENDOR isn't willing/able to help, I don't really expect Expedia to. That said, I do use an agent to arrange self-guided walking trips and things like that and they seem to be a useful resource rather than planning and booking the whole thing myself, in part, because a lot of local knowledge can be involved. But that's different from booking 5 nights in some European city.

snotrockets
0 replies
1d2h

I had a couple of times when car rentals and hotels decided to add surprise charges when I arrived. As those was booked through Expedia, the latter refunded me those immediately (and I suspect went and got them back from the vendor later)

ricardobeat
0 replies
6h43m

Fun fact: momondo.com is part of Kayak, which is owned by Booking.

nkg
0 replies
1d4h

If there's any problem with your flight you're up shit creek if you have to deal via a third party.

I have learned that the hard way. My flight was cancelled and I don't get any notification. There is a real communication issue between OTAs and airlines. After a week of poking the customer service, I got a refund from Opodo, fortunately.

com
2 replies
1d7h

Just for rail, I quite like trainline.com. It tries to hide the madness that is very poor national/private rail service and their ticketing regimes, but really there’s only so much you can do, so often I get two or more tickets for legs of travel, some of which change as I remain on the same train?!?

ytwySXpMbS
1 replies
1d6h

I use Railboard, exactly like trainline but without the booking fee as it's made by national rail

com
0 replies
1d4h

Thanks for that! Unfortunately UK only? Do you know of similar no-fee apps for pan-European travel?

jddj
1 replies
1d6h

Airline websites stick a giant middle finger up at the traditional ecommerce mantra that every extra second costs you N% of sales.

I had to load the desktop version of vueling.com the other day just to have the UI understand that I didn't want to purchase a return flight.

chrisdbanks
0 replies
1d6h

Vueling doesn't even comply with GDPR on their marketing sign up. It's a singularly terrible experience.

simiones
0 replies
1d5h

There is no general legal right for one entity to interpose itself between another entity and its customers. The concept of a User Agent is not a legal concept, it is merely a technical term. If RyanAir doesn't want you to interact with its site through Firefox, they have a legal right to do so. They doubly so have the right to ban Booking.com from buying tickets on your behalf, and then selling them to you for more money.

notresidenter
0 replies
1d4h

rome2rio.com comes closest to that experience compared to the other services (not affiliated)

dudeinjapan
0 replies
21h49m

To answer side question: try skiplagged.com

amelius
23 replies
1d4h

(The highly variable and discriminatory pricing of travel would also best be addressed in regulation, rather than relying entirely on third-party resellers to rescue you.)

How difficult would it be to destroy Booking.com's entire businessmodel or at least their grip on the market?

gumby
21 replies
1d4h

Booking.com's … grip on the market?

Do they have a significant grip on the market? I’ve never used them, but for all I know they sell a majority of plane tickets.

Then again I haven’t used Ryanair either. The reputations of Ryanair, Spirit etc are sufficient for me to avoid them. But in booking.com’s case I barely even know it exists.

amelius
12 replies
1d4h

According to Booking Holdings (Booking.com)'s latest financial reports the company's current revenue (TTM ) is $22.00 B. In 2023 the company made a revenue of $21.36 B an increase over the years 2022 revenue that were of $17.09 B

(from a google search)

gumby
7 replies
1d1h

Wow! Shows I’m living under a basket.

lotsofpulp
6 replies
1d1h

Those numbers did not answer any of your questions.

They are doing significantly better than the main competing travel agent website:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BKNG/booking-holdi...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/EXPE/expedia/marke...

What I always find interesting is middlemen businesses that don’t do any of the risky and laborious work, such as operating hotels and airlines and car rental businesses, earning higher profit margins and profits than the businesses that have to put much more on the line.

You would think the internet would especially be able to split the profit margin of these middlemen between the customer and the actual businesses that do the work by automating and commodifying the middleman’s function.

renewiltord
2 replies
21h50m

That's normal. Information is a very valuable resource. It's often the case that advertising companies can be very profitable while people advertising using them have worse margins.

lotsofpulp
1 replies
21h27m

The information being referred to here is not scarce, though.

All airlines and hotels and car rental websites show everyone the information, at the cost of a few minutes low effort button clicking. A vast change from how difficult and time consuming it was to access information before the internet.

s1artibartfast
0 replies
12h23m

The information being referred to here is not scarce, though. >All airlines and hotels and car rental websites show everyone the information, at the cost of a few minutes low effort button clicking. A vast change from how difficult and time consuming it was to access information before the internet.

I think the difference in information is tremendous. getting 100 quotes from hotels from individual hotels websites would take many hours, and is a 5 second operation through booking.

Consider that you might do that several of times in the process of creating a booking, it might represent a dozens of hours of information collection and organization.

organization and accessibility has tremendous value to the customer.

listenallyall
2 replies
15h18m

You would think the internet would especially be able to split ...

If it isn't obvious yet, the enormous reach and scale of the internet does the exact opposite, it basically guarantees consolidation. Booking and Expedia each used to be 4 or 5 independent companies. The booking engines wield power by de-listing any operators who offer lower prices anywhere else, and none of the hotel chains can risk not appearing on the sites, even more so when there are only two.

lotsofpulp
1 replies
14h28m

The hotel chains can get together and offer a website showing lower prices to their rewards members.

In fact they did, called roomkey.com Hilton/ihg/marriott/hyatt/choice/wyndham options could all be searched simultaneously, and you get the lowest price and the hotels avoid paying commission to Expedia and booking.

But they shut it down. I wonder if it was because hotels are usually franchised, and the brands get a percentage of revenue as royalty, so they don’t care about commissions the hotel operators have to pay. So they decide to price discriminate via the travel agents.

It should be similarly trivial for the airlines and car rental companies to get together and offer the same website. Isn’t it better to give customers a 7% discount rather than give booking/Expedia 15%?

Obviously, reality is different so there must be a reason. I’m guessing the gains from price discrimination are more than the losses from commissions.

listenallyall
0 replies
1h31m

The most likely explanation for shutting it down was the enormous cost of driving traffic to the site. After 20+ years of habits, it's hard to tell people about a new site, let alone get them to use it regularly. And given that hotel room prices change all the time, it's difficult to even prove they have the lowest prices.

Plus it is hard to get competitors to work together on something. Orbitz was started by a partnership of airlines. It IPO'd and then was acquired by a private company, all within 3 years after launching. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitz

s1artibartfast
3 replies
1d4h

Is that 1% or 100% of their market? Did they turn a profit?

listenallyall
2 replies
15h35m

Booking.com reported net income of 4.2 billion in 2023. More than American Airlines ($822 million), United ($2.6 billion) and almost as much as Delta (4.6 billion). Meanwhile Booking.com has no planes, no hotels, no rental cars, no inventory of anything, really.

https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/bkng/financial...

https://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2024/American-Airlines...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UAL/united-airline....

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/delta-air-lines-full-2023-103...

ricardobeat
1 replies
6h50m

Almost entirely from hotel reservations. The flight business is a small slice of that.

listenallyall
0 replies
1h40m

Agreed, but there are more major hotel chains than major airlines, for the purposes of providing a basic comparison. And this particular article was about them and Ryanair.

blackeyeblitzar
4 replies
1d4h

They’re bigger in Europe

ghaff
1 replies
1d4h

That's probably true. I've never used them in the US but they seem to often be the site of choice in Europe and Asia (and, based on one recent experience in Europe, can have inventory that can't be accessed any other way). That said, you also have to take direct bookings into account which is most of what I (at any rate) do.

dawnerd
0 replies
1d3h

You may have used them indirectly though due to them owning a lot of OTAs. It’s basically a duopoly of Booking Holding and Expedia Group.

bboygravity
1 replies
1d4h

And (South East) Asia

dgellow
0 replies
1d4h

Under the brand name Agoda if I remember correctly

naiv
1 replies
1d4h

They own Priceline, Kayak, Agoda and a lot of other sites

gumby
0 replies
1d1h

Ah, thanks. I do use kayak to look up flights (which I then book directly).

carlosjobim
0 replies
14h25m

Destroying their business model is impossible, because both customers and hotels want it. Destroying their grip on the market (I assume you mean accommodation and not flights) would be by offering a better service.

lesuorac
46 replies
1d4h

Jury Verdict: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18414221/457/ryanair-da...

Part E: Computer Fraud an Abuse Act Loss

Did Ryanair prove by a preponderance of evidence that it suffered actual economic harm caused by Booking.com violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and, if yes, state the amount.

X Yes _ No

$ 5000

Part E Nominal Damages

$ 0

Part F: Punitive Damages

$0

I know Rynair won the lawsuit but uh, having to pay only 5k sounds like a win for Booking.com

mensetmanusman
29 replies
1d3h

So they could hire some mechanical turks from Africa to type prices into an Excel sheet for $5000.

miroljub
22 replies
1d3h

Why Africa? Why not southern Wyoming?

mensetmanusman
9 replies
1d3h

It’s the openAI way.

alwa
8 replies
1d2h

For context, OpenAI recently caught flak from the less substantial organs of the American press for outsourcing RLHF/safety/content moderation tasks to a small SF firm called Sama (surely coincidental, eh @sama?). Sama hired workers in Kenya, Uganda, and India and paid them well above prevailing local wages, but the work involved the usual unpleasantness that content moderators have to deal with.

Much ballyhooing about “neo-colonialism” followed.

[0] https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

chx
7 replies
1d1h

I refuse the framing of tech bros exploiting African workers as "Much ballyhooing about neo-colonialism".

IncreasePosts
3 replies
1d

Offering locally competitive wages is exploiting?

If a company is based in NYC, and has a branch in rural Ohio, are the Ohioans being exploited if they aren't paid as much as their NYC counterparts despite drastically reduced cost of living in rural Ohio?

Marsymars
2 replies
21h56m

Well... yes?

If digital widget producers are worth $x to the company, and get paid 0.8x in one location and 0.4x in another location, I'm not sure why I'd regard that as anything other than exploitative.

CoL isn't really related to the market value of labour for remote-capable jobs; it would be similarly exploitative if the company paid childfree people, vegetarians, and basement apartment dwellers less because of their drastically reduced cost of living.

I could see a point for fairness if the salaries were scaled so that average post-CoL savings in different CoL areas were equal, particular within regions (e.g. a country) where people have freedom of movement.

satvikpendem
1 replies
9h38m

CoL isn't really related to the market value of labour for remote-capable jobs

I mean, it is. Wages are a market, thus supply and demand applies. We are not in a socialist society where there is some inherent "exploitation" which is basically what you're talking about.

Marsymars
0 replies
4h52m

Yes, I misspoke, the market value is different, but the actual, objectively measurable value to the company is not.

That we're not in a socialist society is exactly the reason for any inherent exploitation.

And like, I'm saying this as a pretty gung-ho capitalist.

Wytwwww
1 replies
1d

offering jobs well above prevailing local wages = exploiting

I would assume you also believe that every single person working for a wage is also by definition exploiting regardless of where they are? Otherwise it would make very little sense...

stonogo
0 replies
23h45m

Offering jobs in areas with laxer worker protections is arguably exploitative because in most or all of america this sort of work comes with counseling, due to the horrific nature of some of the content to be moderated. I don't know offhand of OpenAI ensured this was available; if not, that's a substantial financial savings at a cost of human suffering, which fits some folks' definition of exploitation.

Y_Y
0 replies
1d

Isn't this the classic problem with getting involved in poorer economies? The African workers are worse off than if they were treated as an average US worker, but better off than an average African worker, and definitely better off than if Sama has hired Americans instead.

theptip
8 replies
1d3h

Quite obviously, minimum wage is many times higher in the US.

nilamo
6 replies
1d2h

Minimum wage is not applicable for gig work. It would basically be the same business model as companies like https://rev.com, which can be <$1 per video transcribed.

nilamo
4 replies
23h19m

I fail to understand how that applies to what I said.

JumpCrisscross
3 replies
23h14m

fail to understand how that applies to what I said

"<$1 per video transcribed" may be an order of magnitude more expensive.

nilamo
2 replies
22h57m

More expensive than what? And how does that relate to minimum wages? And how does that relate to minimum wages with respect to gig work?

JumpCrisscross
1 replies
22h9m

More expensive than what?

“The average wage in Nigeria is about $25 per day.” Wages in Southern Wyoming are more expensive than that. Gig or minimum is irrelevant.

how does that relate to minimum wages

Wyoming is subject to the federal minimum wage.

how does that relate to minimum wages with respect to gig work?

We’re comparing two numbers and observing one of them is bigger.

nilamo
0 replies
21h25m

But we're comparing minimum wages in two places when the minimum wage is not a relevant number, since, as stated above, minimum wage does not apply to gig work.

jfyi
0 replies
1d

Shhhh, we didn't tell Wyoming.

rolph
0 replies
1d2h

the original chess playing Mechanical_turk was a fraudulent device, likely more at home proximal to the nigerian princes, than with wild west gypsy wagon snake oil peddlars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_turk

pipes
0 replies
23h58m

Because racism!!! Not really, there have been quite a few stories recently about companies claiming to be AI powered when in fact they are using African workers to perform tasks. The Turk bit is just what Amazon called their platform for outsourcing crappy repetitive work, which is named after the famous mechanical Turk.

petsfed
0 replies
1d

Do you not know anything about the economy of southern Wyoming?

Extractive industry is such a job creator there that for decades now, e.g. McDonalds couldn't keep enough people on hand. Why would I work a shitty job for minimum wage, when I could work another, similarly shitty job, for 4 times that amount?

Extractive industry is such a job creator in Wyoming that they actively resist e.g. renewable energy projects that would provide economic stability during inevitable bust years, because it challenges the concept of extractive industry, even as extractive industry generates the boom/bust cycle.

Southern Wyoming doesn't even have fucking Uber, you really think they're starving for gig-sector jobs like this?

swarnie
5 replies
1d3h

Oh lord you need to rephrase that....

schnebbau
2 replies
1d3h

Which part? Mechanical turk is an Amazon service for crowdsourcing work, and Africa has cheap IT literate labor so would be a good source for this type of work.

mtmail
1 replies
1d1h

Cheap IT literate labor can be found around the world (also thanks to Mechanical Turk and similar services), no need to single out one region.

qeternity
0 replies
23h8m

What is the issue with singling out a region with a factual statement?

It wasn't a pejorative comment. Africa and SE Asia have huge labor forces that perform this work.

People really need to stop trying so hard to be offended.

stonogo
0 replies
23h49m

No, it is specifically not an automaton. It has a human operator.

ActionHank
7 replies
1d4h

This sets a precedent going forward that will impact Booking.com and many other services that do the same thing.

I would imagine that it is also a nice foundation for cases against AI training data scraped from sites.

SteveNuts
6 replies
1d1h

Pretty soon every single website will be hidden behind a login page

chrisjj
3 replies
23h57m

And pretty soon afterward, every one of those login page will be circumvented by a bot signup.

heavyset_go
2 replies
19h24m

Don't worry, you'll need to upload your photo ID to be able to login and do anything online.

remram
1 replies
15h29m

People who run bots have IDs.

chrisjj
0 replies
9h19m

Indeed. And they also have everything else that could be used to ID a human, or soon will do e.g. DNA.

TechDebtDevin
1 replies
1d1h

Yeah but then they'll have an unauthenticated API, I see this often.

Website owners will also never stop scraping and prosecuting the owner of every crawler (who can obfuscate their identity anyways) is impossible.

Captchas are going to increasingly become more obsolete.

It's a fools errand to spend resources fighting scrapers.

Edit (non cancerous URL) https://i.redd.it/o6xypg00uac91.png

eli
5 replies
1d4h

Yeah but they have to stop doing it

lesuorac
4 replies
1d4h

Or what? They'll have to pay another 5k for 4 years of access (lawsuit was filed in 2020)?

eli
2 replies
1d3h

At the least, they would find out real fast how big those punitive damages can get when it's a repeated and willful violation.

CFAA isn't a joke - there are potential criminal penalties to executives and others within the company.

eli
0 replies
5h14m

I'm pretty sure C-suite executives are not officially exempt from criminal laws that apply to everyone else, but I guess the Supreme Court may yet rule otherwise.

mywittyname
0 replies
1d3h

Worst case: An injunction is filed and they have to shut down.

Likely outcome: they negotiate a deal with RyanAir for access to their data & API.

dhx
1 replies
1d3h

Given the two possible outcomes:

1. Jury verdict is "NO" to CFAA violations.

2. Jury verdict is "YES" to CFAA violations and the jury award $0.

Is option (2) worse for Ryanair because it more negatively impacts any appeals process that they may have otherwise planned?

Does the award of $0 become a precedent which is stronger than option (1) in deterring would-be CFAA litigants of the future?

lesuorac
0 replies
1d2h

You cannot have option 2; jury instructions required that CFAA requires >= $5k of damages. ("If your answer to that question is no, do not answer the remaining questions in Section 1").

So, damages of 5k is strictly the lowest amount possible while also answering YES for CFAA.

always_learning
25 replies
1d9h

pretty bad precedent, id argue that anything thats publicly accesible is free to be scraped. So unless they did something illegal via bypassing security, then this sets a really bad tone for internet archival, web scraping and data collection in the future.

walthamstow
12 replies
1d9h

As I understand it, scraping data read-only is fine (Google Flights, Skyscanner etc) but using automated processes to book tickets on behalf of customers without sending them to the Ryanair site is not fine.

skissane
5 replies
1d9h

If the ruling (which I haven't read) says automated booking via screen scraping is illegal: wouldn't a workaround be to replace the automated process with a human in a low-cost country?

arghwhat
2 replies
1d8h

Sure, but that's what you want, not what booking.com wants. Booking.com wants to charge you for the service, and if they're not part of the transaction they'd have to get money out-of-band, e.g. as a subscription for the price finding service.

Remember that this lawsuit is between two large companies both trying to get your money.

skissane
1 replies
19h33m

Booking.com wants to charge you for the service, and if they're not part of the transaction they'd have to get money out-of-band

I think you misunderstand what I meant. To be more specific: if the ruling says that automated booking via screen scraping is illegal – what's to stop Booking.com hiring warm bodies in low cost countries, replacing their fully automated solution with a semi-automated solution to dodge the ruling, and continuing to charge their customers for that service?

arghwhat
0 replies
10h32m

The ruling does not say anything about screen scraping or automation, and the verdict also holds if warm bodies in low cost countries were used.

What was ruled was that:

1. That Booking.com "intentionally directed, encouraged or induced Etraveli to access the myRyanair portion of Ryanair's website without authorization"

2. That "Etraveli recklessly caused Damage to a protected computer by way of such access to the myRyanair portion of Ryanair's website without authorization"

3. That "Etraveli caused both Damage to a protected computer and Loss by way of such access to the myRyanair portion of Ryanair's website without authorization"

4. That booking.com "knowingly and with intent to defraud, directed, encouraged, or induced a third party to access the myRyanair portion of Ryanair's website without authorization and by means of such conduct furthered the intended fraud and obtained something of value for booking.com"

5. That "the object of the fraud and the thing of value obtained by Booking.com [was] only the use of the myRyanair portion of Ryanir's website"

whazor
0 replies
1d8h

Or performing screen scraping in a country where it is not illegal.

hellweaver666
0 replies
1d9h

That sounds like a very Amazon-esque solution!

rob74
2 replies
1d9h

And here I was thinking that read-only was part of the definition of scraping?

tgv
0 replies
1d9h

The article mentions reselling.

rsynnott
0 replies
1d9h

Yeah, it's not a terribly well-written article, and _Ryanair_ is certainly trying to push the line that this is about scraping, but it's hard to imagine that the _resale_ thing wasn't a significant part of the case.

reddalo
2 replies
1d5h

I'm not sure Google Flights actually scrapes RyanAir. I think they connect to API services such as Amadeus.

chx
0 replies
1d

Not Ryanair, no. Wizz Air got semi-recently hooked into the GDS systems but Ryanair no.

arghwhat
5 replies
1d9h

This lawsuit is not about scraping, it is about booking.com acting as a reseller of ryanair products without a reseller agreement - to which they mention that booking.com adds their own profits to the transaction and makes ryanair unable to communicate with the real customer - through "unauthorized access" (scraping).

What we on hackernews would consider scraping is not covered by this lawsuit, and ryanair's vendetta is not against scraping but "pirate online travel agencies" (resellers).

ericd
2 replies
1d4h

Why is the CFAA mentioned, then? That’s historically been used as a bludgeon against scraping.

“A US court ruled that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing part of Ryanair's website without permission, court documents showed, a ruling the airline said would help end unauthorised screen scraping by booking sites.”

lesuorac
1 replies
1d3h

Ryanair had previously send Cease & Desist letters to Booking.com so they were very explicitly unauthorized Booking.com from accessing their website.

The part that annoys me is the losses are redacted [1]. Judging by the length of the redaction its much more than the $5000 they were ultimately awarded. I'm also very unclear what harm will actually befall Ryanair if the losses weren't redacted.

[1]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18414221/354/ryanair-da...

ericd
0 replies
1d

I’m not a lawyer, and I haven’t kept up very closely with the movements in scraping legality, but my impression was that it was ruled in the past few years that if it’s on the public internet with no login-wall being circumvented, then CFAA isn’t applicable? I seem to recall a collective sigh of relief around some of those rulings.

wcedmisten
1 replies
1d7h

Would a restaurant have the same case against Doordash? Seems like a fairly common business model

arghwhat
0 replies
1d6h

Depends. Established, well-behaved food delivery apps have agreements with the restaurants and have direct integration - not scraping. They take absurd margins, but that's a separate issue.

When the food delivery apps "scrape", it's sometimes okay, but often not: The food offered by a place might be made to be eaten immediately, in which case a 60 minute delivery might guarantee a horrible experience. The food might not even be safe to transport by intermediate handlers, such as if the food is not packaged in sealed containers. In both cases, the food place ends up with dissatisfied customers and bad reputation for something they neither did nor wanted to do.

John Oliver had an interesting video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII

sva_
3 replies
1d9h

In fact I wrote my own RyanAir scraper to get the best prices on flights (it is trivial to implement, they barely have any rate limits - in particular if you use the API endpoint where you search for flights departing from a specific airport).

But I guess my scraping is a lot less, as I'm only looking for a few flights

chrisjj
2 replies
22h58m

Same here. Except my rate was sufficient to trigger throttling.

sva_
1 replies
22h28m

Which API requests did you use?

chrisjj
0 replies
21h50m

HTTP POST :)

slightwinder
0 replies
1d4h

It's not public, it's just generally accessible but with rules. It's similar to how a physical shop is accessible to everyone by default, but the owner still has the right to refuse business and deny access if you behave bad. The problem is that you can't easily deny companies like booking-com access to a website, as they can circumvent any technical barrier.

chrisjj
0 replies
23h42m

Simple scraping is one thing. Scraping to resell in breach of agreed terms is quite another.

doix
21 replies
1d9h

Pretty light article, does anyone have any more context? Does this set a strong precedent for all these types of sites? Booking.com wouldn't be the only site reselling airline tickets, in fact I wasn't even aware they did flights.

Does Booking.com do something particularly bad compared to something like SkyScanner or Google flights?

"We expect that this ruling will end the internet piracy and overcharging perpetrated on both airlines and other travel companies and consumers by the unlawful activity of OTA (online travel agent) Pirates," Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary said.

Why is it almost always cheaper to buy through some weird 3rd party than with the airline directly? Sometimes it's a few bucks and I book with the airline directly, but sometimes it's over $50 cheaper to book through some 3rd party I've never heard of.

figmert
15 replies
1d9h

I could be mistaken, but from what I'm understanding is that Booking.com books the flights for you, by automating the booking process on Ryanair (and subsequently add their own fees), whereas the likes of SkyScanner show you the information, then direct you to the Ryanair website to book through the airline.

codedokode
6 replies
1d8h

I wonder how does booking.com pay for the tickets? Do they use a new card for every transaction or do they buy thousands of tickets with the same card? Do they use a corporate card or personal card (which might be against ToS)? If they use a corporate card, isn't it easy for Ryanair to see it and block the transaction?

Also, cannot airline see that requests come from datacenter IPs and not from residential?

It looks like it is super easy to block this on airline side.

codedokode
2 replies
1d4h

To issue virtual card numbers you must be a bank, right?

tblt
0 replies
1d3h

To be issued a virtual card number, you need only be a bank customer

carlosjobim
0 replies
14h11m

No, eligible businesses can do this through Stripe for example.

gruez
1 replies
1d5h

Also, cannot airline see that requests come from datacenter IPs and not from residential?

Easily solveable by getting a data SIM, plugging it into a LTE/5G USB stick, and routing your traffic through that.

codedokode
0 replies
1d4h

It is not very reliable link though, there will be errors, timeouts.

doix
2 replies
1d9h

You're right, I was mixing concepts. SkyScanner and Google flights both do what you say. The companies that SkyScanner and co find are what Ryanair are complaining about. So the likes of; Trip, MyTrip, Kiwi, Expedia, GoToGate etc. I wonder if this will affect all of them.

philipwhiuk
1 replies
1d7h

GoToGate is what booking.com flights actually are (at least last time I booked). So probably.

gruez
0 replies
1d5h

Wikipedia says they did it at some point, but stopped.

GoToGate was used for a time as the flight provider for Booking.com for various European countries.[7]
baxtr
2 replies
1d8h

Which is actually convenient for booking users. The Ryanair website is a big mess.

maccard
0 replies
1d7h

Is it? it’s certainly no worse than EasyJet, and unlike the larger transatlantic carriers (ba/united/delta are the ones I’m most experienced with) the websites are navigable, performant, and actually functional.

Meanwhile booking.com has a recurring pattern of diverting you via search results to show you extra sponsored results. My experience is that Ryanair is far easier to navigate and book than Booking.com

2rsf
0 replies
1d7h

I recently ordered ticket from Ryanair, if you simply look for the "next" button nothing is a mess. The only somewhat messy thing is the content of what you buy, for example a family package has only one large suitcase which is unusual, and that Ryanair are super strict at the airport- I saw someone taking out socks to remove extra 300 grams from their suitcase.

madaxe_again
1 replies
1d9h

Yup, and having needed customer service the one time I booked a flight through booking.com, I can confirm that they absolutely get in the way - a name change on a ticket turned into an almighty rigamarole with charges left right and centre - even though it was booking who had truncated the name - and the airline wouldn’t talk to me directly as I wasn’t the booking party, booking.com was. The airline said the change would have been free if they could do it themselves, but the request had to originate from booking.com, who not only charged nearly €200 but also took so long about it (a week) they were almost too late.

I never thought I’d find myself arguing Ryanair’s corner, but adding booking.com to the mix likely just makes an already poor experience with Ryanair truly dire.

lotsofpulp
0 replies
1d8h

Which is why I always try to cut out as many middlemen as possible, especially when traveling. Except Costco, because it’s Costco.

chx
1 replies
1d

Why is it almost always cheaper to buy through some weird 3rd party than with the airline directly?

sometimes it's over $50 cheaper

$ tells me you are in the US where these kind of legacy shenanigans happen. Never with Ryanair.

doix
0 replies
1d

I'm actually from the UK, just wrote it in dollars since it's a currency I assume everyone knows the value of. I just check SkyScanner and buy from the cheapest reseller. Very recently I had to buy a ticket from Edinburgh to Oslo, it was £45 cheaper to buy it from Trip.com than directly from Norwegian Airlines.

Out of curiosity, I did go and check a bunch of routes that I know Ryanair flies on SkyScanner, and it was cheaper to buy directly from Ryanair. So fair play to them, I'm surprised anyone would buy from a 3rd party when buying direct is cheaper.

Klonoar
1 replies
1d6h

> Does Booking.com do something particularly bad compared to something like SkyScanner or Google flights?

Presumably, given they're fine with Google Flights:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67873695

"In a statement, Ryanair described the online agents as "pirates". It said it would "continue to make its fares available to honest/transparent online travel agents such as Google Flights," which it said "do not add hidden mark ups to Ryanair prices and who direct passengers to make their bookings directly on the Ryanair.com website"."

chrisjj
0 replies
23h44m

honest/transparent online travel agents such as Google Flights

Disingenuous at best. Google Flights is not a Ryanair agent.

slightwinder
0 replies
1d4h

Does this set a strong precedent for all these types of sites?

Ryanair has successfully sued other companies doing the same for a while now. But I mostly know about their cases in the EU. This case is from USA.

Why is it almost always cheaper to buy through some weird 3rd party than with the airline directly?

It's not necessarily cheaper, the flight-search is usually just better in filtering, and has a cache of previous results. So humans might get the same cheap result if they just search long enough and know how to use the airline-site efficiently.

bradvl
17 replies
1d7h

The reason that Ryanair is against OTAs reselling flights is not the fees, it’s that they’re often resold as a package holiday.

Package holidays are flights bundled with hotels etc and are usually sold at much higher margin.

Ryanair has its own package holiday business and prefers that they make the margin, not someone else.

There are many more package holiday companies than airlines, they want to use this ruling and the fact that they also own an airline to restrict competition and make more money.

oneshtein
10 replies
1d5h

So, basically, Ryanair is against free market. They want to have monopoly, to raise prices. Good for Ryanair, bad for consumers.

miohtama
5 replies
1d3h

Ryanair wants to make it harder for consumer to compare prices.

FinnKuhn
4 replies
1d2h

And Ryanair wants to upsell you during the buying process, which they can't do as well, if you don't buy on their site.

sureIy
3 replies
23h49m

This is the reason.

Nothing is stopping airlines from offering 1-click bookings, except that lengthy funnels bring in tons of cash. Ryanair has been a master at this since the beginning of time.

In 2020 I booked a flight directly on Google Flights and the booking was complete before I even realized, it was so simple. I never found that UI again.

throwaway2037
2 replies
12h44m

    > I booked a flight directly on Google Flights
Does anyone else have the experience where 25-50% of the click-here-to-buy from Google Flights just don't work? Is it bait-and-switch from the carrier?

ricardobeat
0 replies
6h31m

The underlying systems are old, slow and have multiple layers of caching, plus it’s a huge search space, so you’re never really seeing real-time availability. It’s just the nature of it that a lot of the times the tickets are already gone, though Google used to be one of the most reliable.

miohtama
0 replies
5h36m

It has happened for me many times, so could have some truth here

zie
0 replies
1d4h

This is like standard business methodology these days. Nearly every company prefers this. Just ask any olympian how hard it is to even get to the olympics let alone win.

Business would much rather be proprietary and not have to work that hard.

s_dev
0 replies
1d4h

Ryanair is against free market. They want to have monopoly, to raise prices.

This is the goal of almost every business and that isn't against the free market it is the free market and the precise reason we have regulators to ensure competition.

hbosch
0 replies
1d3h

Booking.com isn't the market force keeping Ryanair's prices down.

TeaBrain
0 replies
1d4h

Booking is just acting as a middleman. Booking flights are still being booked through Ryanair, which was part of the suit.

mFixman
4 replies
1d4h

A big part is fees. OTAs like Booking sell the base part of flight from Ryanair and low cost airlines at the same price as the airlines but with much higher fees for luggage and extras. They hide this second part from flight search engines, so they appear cheaper when including luggage.

I'm sure that a lot of dislike from low cost airlines comes from shitty OTAs rather than the airlines themselves.

deanCommie
3 replies
1d2h

Boosting this.

I recently tried to use Expedia to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto on Porter Airlines because then I could use my TD Reward points.

The default prices that showed up in the results looked the same on Expedia or directly on Porter, so it didn't seem like I was losing anything.

Except that base flight included no carry-on and no checked-baggage, which I needed to do. On Porter directly fixing that cost an extra $40. Expedia said it cost $60.

For this particular flight I also needed to be able to make changes after booking. On Porter that increased the cost by $100. On Expedia, $150.

I still did it, cuz, y'know - points. But I shook my fist at Expedia the entire time.

sureIy
1 replies
23h50m

It can go both ways.

Pros of Expedia:

    - they have my card
    - their website does not suck as much as the airline’s
    - they let me cancel within 24/48 hours for free and immediately 
The second point can be a huge selling point and it applies to a lot of OTAs. Every time I try to book direct “because it’s best” I easily spend triple the time and sometimes I get fleeced anyway (oh, here’s a $5 convenience fee for using a credit card we don’t like)

throwaway2037
0 replies
12h47m

    > Every time I try to book direct “because it’s best” I easily spend triple the time
I have a similar experience. As a result, I have not booked a flight directly on the carrier's website in years. Do only suckers use the carrier's website now, because the prices and/or service are always worse? Sigh.

xmprt
0 replies
22h49m

Not that this would help now, but you might have been able to book through Expedia and then later add the luggage through the airline directly. Still can't use points on it but maybe you could have saved the points for another vacation some other time.

mejutoco
0 replies
1d7h

Or selling insurance, renting a car, etc.

teeheelol
8 replies
1d9h

I'm not sure why because Ryanair looks really good on the scrapers. I bet it drives a lot of business their way.

That is of course until you add all the additional charges.

rsynnott
5 replies
1d8h

Ryanair's claim was that Booking.com etc was reselling its seats, adding its own charges on top, and providing false passenger details. It's in Ryanair's interest to portray this as basically a screen scraping case (because Ryanair don't like screen scraping in general), but there does seem to be more to it than just that.

ta1243
4 replies
1d8h

Ryanair relies on dark patterns and brainwashing as part of the checkout process to sell you hotels, insurance, car hire, etc. Those feed into their income stream.

If you bypass that process they don't make their profit.

Toutouxc
1 replies
1d6h

I still don't understand, I flew with them last year, and just now I dry-ran booking a flight from Prague to Bologna. The entire thing feels quite streamlined and straightforward. Pick two dates, you're offered flights on or around the dates, you pick the flights, then you pick the "package" (basic, regular, plus, flexi plus) and it shows a HUGE matrix with big fat check marks for stuff you get and no check marks for stuff you DON'T GET (reserved seats, cabin luggage, checked luggage, free check-in at the airport). Honestly, if someone can't navigate the process as it is today, I'd be worried about them traveling to a foreign country. Any additional offers (hotels, insurance, cars) you can safely ignore.

switch007
0 replies
1d3h

Yes, in their defense, that matrix is an improvement. Though it's not perfect and still intended to fool people: you would expect as you go up the tiers that everything from the previous tier is included but that's not the case: "Plus" doesn't include a carry-on/priority boarding from the "Regular" fare. And the most expensive option "Flexi Plus" doesn't include a checked bag (easy to miss when all other options are included)

2rsf
1 replies
1d7h

I am not sure what "dark patterns and brainwashing" are you referring to, I booked flights through Norwegian- a calm scandinavian low cost company, and had to say no many times to car and hotel offers. The same when renting cars from big companies.

ta1243
0 replies
1d5h

Lets say 20% of people booking through ryanair and paying £30 for a flight go for their "upselling" (which is deliberatly designed to get more people to add it). That makes ryanair £50 each. That pushes the revenue per customer upto £40.

Lets say the cost is £35, and thus ryanair makes £5 profit per passenger.

Now lets say someone else comes along as sells the ryanair flight for £30 and has their own "upselling": "Click here to not avoid missing out on our great protection package" etc. Ryanair now is making a £5 loss on each ticket sold, and the reseller is making it instead.

surfingdino
0 replies
1d9h

You can fly for not a lot of money on Ryanair, their fee structure, website, and app are similar to all other budget airlines. Those extra fees are for handling your luggage (extra manpower and fuel). If you want to complain about Ryanair's fees, get hold of the Fees Schedule for the airport you fly from and to. You will learn how much airports charge for landing, parking, hangarage, handling, fuel, etc. It's an eye-opening read.

chrisjj
0 replies
22h50m

Consider the business it drives away from Ryanair by the price raise.

cactusplant7374
8 replies
1d9h

Did Ryanair try blocking their IP’s or adding captchas? Or did they sue because the cat and mouse game became too much?

pickledoyster
6 replies
1d9h

iirc, Ryanair login-walled ticket prices, which means anyone accessing the pricing/booking pages were agreeing to their ToS

Closi
4 replies
1d9h

I’m not sure that’s what login-walled means (ie I can access pricing and booking pages without logging in)

If you search on google you are also agreeing to their terms, there just isn’t a checkbox.

codetrotter
2 replies
1d9h

This case is about more than that:

It says the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.
benj111
1 replies
1d8h

What it's 'about' (according to one side) and the law involved are 2 separate things.

When I buy something from the supermarket, they add charges and make it difficult for the manufacturer to contact me directly, so that isn't illegal. Many things with bad outcomes are legal.

Breaking the terms of service of the site may be illegal, and if you're mis representing yourself to log in, even more so.

But then you're also moving away from what I would term screen scraping.

chrisjj
0 replies
21h17m

make it difficult for the manufacturer to contact me directly

Probably a good thing in the case of most manufacturers.

rsynnott
0 replies
1d8h

If you search on google you are also agreeing to their terms, there just isn’t a checkbox.

Depends where you are, really. In Europe, where Ryanair does virtually all their business, courts have generally been reluctant to take the "haha, you clicked on the website, you've magically agreed to the license" thing as being particularly meaningful, and recent regulations have cut down the usefulness of EULAs even further.

That said, Ryanair prices aren't login-walled anyway.

rsynnott
0 replies
1d8h

Nah, just went to their website; you don't need to be logged in to price tickets.

(It's _possible_ that this is a recent DMA/DSA compliance thing, I suppose.)

walthamstow
0 replies
1d9h

If you play the whackamole game with IP blocking and captchas, you'll be playing it forever. A court ruling against the practice is much more effective.

snowpid
5 replies
1d9h

Though I am not a legal expert, it is fascinating, that both European companies had this dispute in front of US courts. One hypothesis would be, that Ryan Air lawyers saw higher chances there than in EU courts.

ivan_gammel
4 replies
1d9h

Isn’t Booking an American company now? The company in Amsterdam is a subsidiary of Delaware company with HQ in Connecticut.

em500
1 replies
1d8h

Company nationality is a somewhat diffuse concept. IKEA, Chrysler, Fiat and Citroen have holding companies in the Netherlands. Should they be considered Dutch companies? Share owners (also of American listed and incorporated companies) are from all over the world.

ivan_gammel
0 replies
1d5h

It depends, right? In case of Booking, aren’t other subsidiaries also selling airline tickets? It would be reasonable for all those sites to have a common platform for data and that means the holding company is the right target to sue.

snowpid
0 replies
1d9h

Looks like an American company called Priceline bought booking.com and rename themself after them.

Booking.com brands themself as European, during the DMA debattes and complained they have a disadvantage to American competitors.

hellweaver666
0 replies
1d8h

Booking.com BV is a Dutch Company which has subsidiaries all over the world but is also itself a subsidiary of Booking Holdings Group which also owns Priceline, Kayak, OpenTable and quite a few more companies.

hipadev23
5 replies
1d2h

This will very likely be overturned as it flies in the face of the 9th circuit court decision on HiQ vs LinkedIn. This is in a different circuit, so it'll need to be elevated, but CFAA is absolutely the incorrect tool to be utilized here.

[1] https://calawyers.org/privacy-law/ninth-circuit-holds-data-s...

byteknight
1 replies
1d1h

CFAA was already reworded I thought to avoid these exact types of situations? Among other things, responsible disclosure.

hdmoore
0 replies
16h17m

The CFAA has not been amended, but there was DoJ policy change on enforcement. So everyone is always breaking the law in the course of normal business, and it's still up to the prosector to determine who to go after: - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-announces-...

jcranmer
0 replies
21h40m

I haven't followed the facts of this case, and I haven't found any quickly online. The best I have is the order on the motion to dismiss [1], which covers why the judge thought HiQ v LinkedIn wasn't sufficient prior precedent to preclude this being a CFAA violation, along with Ryanair's motion for summary judgement [2] which suggests the results of discovery.

The short answer is... uh, not much. The order on the motion to dismiss suggests that to violate the CFAA, there is a requirement that you're specifically bypassing some form of access control, and it says the complaint sufficiently alleges such control (specifically password-protects internet accounts). Which... is a somewhat weak argument, but the judge here seems to think that HiQ is narrowly focused on "what's publicly available without requiring users to authenticate themselves." The motion for summary judgement states:

Booking and Kayak admit that their access was intentional, and there are no factual disputes that Booking’s and Kayak’s access circumvents authentication mechanisms implemented by Ryanair specifically to keep Defendants out.

which, again, is vague on what those authentication mechanisms were, and it's not like this article provides any elucidation.

It's far from certain that this will be overturned on appeal, but "creating an account to use for screen scraping" doesn't sound like something that CFAA prohibits.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.731...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.731...

inopinatus
0 replies
21h15m

We may well find that this matter doesn't ultimately hinge on screen-scraping as much as it does deceptive behaviour by an agent.

HDThoreaun
0 replies
22h31m

Or the 9ths decision gets overturned...

lifeisstillgood
4 replies
1d7h

I had always assumed Booking.com had some resale agreement with hotels and airlines - there was always some weird issue where if I called a hotel and asked for a room it was more expensive than booking.com or was not available yet was on booking.com

What gets me is why on Earth any provider would allow this - dealing direct is so much more sane 99% of the time, and a package holiday provider already has a reseller agreement.

Just stomp booking.com into the ground - I simply don’t understand why hotels and airlines don’t do it?

jsiepkes
1 replies
1d6h

Just stomp booking.com into the ground - I simply don’t understand why hotels and airlines don’t do it?

Classic prisoners dillema. The problem is all the hotels, etc. need to be on the same page.

lifeisstillgood
0 replies
1d6h

No that’s the search engine trap - which hotel shall I go to is a map not a search page. It’s a marketing exercise - which influencer, which email drop, which word of mouth.

It’s everything that was before Google captured all the advertising revenue there ever was. And reduced it to a list on a black ink on white page

Airlines are in a race to the bottom because there are only 8 bits in the 1970s booking system so there is only a competition on seat price. Chnage that to be able to have different parameters and we compete on other factors

If hotels are just competing for price on booking.com then they are heading to the same trap - beautiful architecture, fantastic location, smiling staff, 1950s movie stars making films in the courtyard- none of it matters if it’s price per room in NYC.

The only way cows stop being treated like cattle is to make sure every human sees them as individuals - it’s a lot of work. But the struggle is worth the abbatoir.

robjan
0 replies
1d5h

Booking.com is a travel agent and they do have agreements with most airlines using GDS such as Amadeus or Sabre. It's a symbiotic relationship.

carlosjobim
0 replies
14h0m

Hotel owners like working with booking, and yes, they have resale agreements with all hotels and other accommodation providers they list on their website.

Havoc
4 replies
1d4h

How does the fraud part come in here? Not seeing it

chrisjj
3 replies
22h48m

When buying the ticket, Booking.com pretends to Ryanair to be the customer.

Havoc
2 replies
11h8m

I see. You’d need to be pretty daft to think the booking website is Ryanair but yeah I guess

chrisjj
1 replies
9h30m

That is not the deception. You see a Booking.com page offering a Ryanair ticket. The one deceived is Ryanair, when it gets an order from Booking.com pretending to be you.

Havoc
0 replies
8h25m

ah gotcha. That makes more sense

soci
3 replies
1d3h

the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.

AFAIK, it's impossible to resell flight tickets in EU, they are attached to real names that are checked upon boarding time. If wonder how did Booking manage to resell Ryanair tickets at scale?

gopher2000
1 replies
1d3h

Do they buy-and-resell or do they just provide a front for the ticket-buying flow with their own fees added on top?

chrisjj
0 replies
22h53m

The latter.

chrisjj
0 replies
22h54m

By injecting the real names. Hence fraud.

sega_sai
3 replies
1d6h

If it was up to me, I would have required all airlines publish their fares in machine readable format.

maronato
0 replies
21h28m

Displaying the fares in a separate website isn’t the problem. The resale of tickets is, since other aggregators need to pay Ryanair a license fee to resell, and Booking is avoiding that by using RPA

dmbaggett
0 replies
1d5h

They were once required to do so (and may still be; I’m not sure at this point), at least if they want to offer flights to or from the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPCO

However, interpreting this data properly is decidedly nontrivial (>1M LoC).

Pricing does not imply booking is OK, though. And even circa 1999, Southwest hassled us (ITA Software) about even showing their fares, without us offering any way to book any flights on any carrier.

chrisjj
0 replies
22h57m

Ryanair does. The machine is yours running a browser.

lifestyleguru
3 replies
1d9h

Simultaneously being hostile towards users with upselling dark patterns and towards web scappers where everyone is a suspect, that's what most of the web has become.

rob74
2 replies
1d9h

Mind you, Booking.com is no stranger to using dark patterns itself...

lifestyleguru
0 replies
1d7h

I'm avoiding them at all cost, unfortunately I'm unable to avoid airline reservation websites and apps

2rsf
0 replies
1d7h

Even more than Ryanair, they are on the verge of cheating in the search and order process while Ryanair "merely" shows aggressive offers.

RyanHamilton
2 replies
1d6h

I was at a startup event last year where someone that had been very senior and instrumental in Ryanair starting was talking to a small audience (<40 people). He told the story of how they didn't notice booking.com was "stealing" so much of their profit. To rephrase his words: "We gave those guys free advertising on our site and without us realising they were quickly making more profit per head than we were. Before we noticed and could do anything they had gotten too big to effectively cut off." So it's funny to see this posted and that the frenemy fight continues to this day.

ricardobeat
0 replies
6h38m

The “free advertising” has little impact on profits from flight tickets, as most aggregators don’t sell at a huge markup. He’s probably thinking of revenue Booking made from hotel bookings, where margins are way higher - but that’s not really taking away revenue from the flight company (and they get affiliate agreements to earn back a significant chunk of that).

too big to effectively cut off

This is also true for the hotel industry, and is part of their moat. Smaller hotels especially can have the bulk of their revenue coming from aggregators, so they can’t drop the platform regardless of how much they like it or not. Building your own marketing channels is hard and expensive.

dzonga
0 replies
1d5h

skyscanner would list ryanair traffic on their sites. even though they don't make money from ryanair via click referrals but because of the traffic that ryanair brings.

oneeyedpigeon
1 replies
1d4h

Can someone clarify what "access parts of Ryanair's website without authorisation" actually means? Are they referring to programmatic account creation?

nness
0 replies
1d4h

I'd love to read the full text of the judgement, as the news articles and press releases are vague as to how the ruling was reached.

My assumption is that the issue was not about automation/scraping, but rather, the way in which booking.com engaged in scraping amounted to some kind of fraud.

dhx
1 replies
1d8h

It appears the latest opinion may not yet be published for this case 20-cv-01191-LPS, Ryanair DAC v. Booking Holdings Inc. et al, United States District Court of Delaware.

This is the first opinion on the case from 2021 which denied Booking Holdings Inc request to dismiss:

[1] https://www.ded.uscourts.gov/sites/ded/files/opinions/20-cv-...

Ryanair (Irish company) makes one claim against Delaware corporation Booking Holdings Inc (including subsidiaries Kayak Software Corporation and Priceline LLC as Delaware corporations and Agoda as a Singaporean company) citing 18 USC 1030(a)(2)(C), (a)(4) and (a)(5)(A)-(C)[2]. Amongst reasons to seek dismissal of the case, Booking Holdings Inc name drops Etraveli, Mystifly and Travelfusion as the three companies which were used by Booking Holdings Inc to scrape airline websites including Ryanair's website.

It's hard from just this opinion to figure out what exactly Booking Holdings Inc, Etraveli, Mystifly and/or Travelfusion may have been found to do wrong. It sounds most likely that Ryanair may have successfully argued their public website is a "protected computer" because there is a "By clicking search you agree to the Website Terms of Use" button on their main website search form, and the ToS is the form of "protection". Looking behind the scenes, it's a fairly simple "anonymous token" API request without any secrets being required to ask the API to respond.

Deleting the HTML elements from the DOM that provide the "By clicking search you agree.." and the associated checkbox doesn't prevent the form from being submitted and results returned successfully.

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

qingcharles
0 replies
1d

Didn't the HiQ case rule that under the federal CFAA at least, the ToS isn't a form of protection?

Here in Illinois, at least, they make it up to a felony to violate a web site ToS, and it's specifically worded as such in the statute.

Oras
1 replies
1d8h

I always thought booking sites had partnerships with airlines and using an API!

michaelt
0 replies
1d7h

Most airlines have partnerships with booking sites, provide an API, pay the booking site a commission, and have a pricing structure that lets them profitably sell tickets at the advertised prices.

Ryanair doesn't pay a commission to booking sites, and their pricing model is to advertise $15 flights but making booking an obstacle course so plenty of passengers find themselves paying $60 instead.

They therefore don't provide an API for the booking sites to use.

trte9343r4
0 replies
1d9h

There was similar case with Kiwi.com.

Issue was that Kiwi pocketed refounds, would not inform customers of flight changes, changing baggage was very hard...

Ryanair service is OK (if you take it as a bus company). There do no play dead as Airbnb support. During covid they provided refunds sooner than Lufthanza for example.

steelframe
0 replies
1d2h

Did I miss something about what the term "internet piracy" means? From TFA:

"We expect that this ruling will end the internet piracy and overcharging perpetrated on both airlines and other travel companies and consumers by the unlawful activity of OTA (online travel agent) Pirates," Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary said.

I thought piracy was distributing unauthorized copies of things like music and videos. Wouldn't booking.com's actions be closer to unauthorized ticket brokering?

I guess if you want to demonize someone for doing something you don't like it sounds worse to be labeled a "pirate" than an "unauthorized broker."

rolph
0 replies
1d2h

this looks like scalping to me.

[the airline, Europe's largest by passenger numbers, has in recent years launched a series of legal actions against third-party booking platforms that resell its tickets without permission.

It says the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.]

poikroequ
0 replies
1d1h

I suspect there are lots of details and context absent from this article. It's hard to believe this is only about booking.com scraping Ryanair's website. What part of it was "unauthorized", exactly? While it's generally legal in the US to scrape publicly available information, that doesn't translate scraping info that requires logging into an account first.

It seems the bigger issue at hand may be booking.com purchasing the tickets and adding a lot of hidden fees on top.

nsjoz
0 replies
4h36m

Interesting to see Ryanair winning this case against Booking.com. Screen scraping has always been a contentious issue, especially between airlines and travel agencies. On one hand, you have the airlines wanting control over their data and direct sales, while on the other, aggregators argue for consumer convenience. Wonder if this ruling will set a precedent for other airlines to follow suit or if we'll see a push for more robust APIs from companies like Booking.com. What do you all think? Is this a step forward or a step back for consumers?

codersfocus
0 replies
1d2h

Why are two European companies suing eachother in a US court? Ryanair doesn’t even serve the US, right?

b800h
0 replies
1d7h

So this was a criminal offence. Who goes to jail?