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.)
We used to regulate air travel. It was a lot more expensive then.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
In general, European air travel is often pretty cheap relative to trains. Varies enormously though.
Houston to Austin only takes a couple of hours to drive. Flying would be slower, more hassle, way more polluting and more cramped.
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.)
Just remember to leave early enough to arrive at the airport 90 minutes before your scheduled departure time ;)
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.)
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
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).
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.
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.
What are you talking about - that is deregulation. This was a government granted monopoly - you don't get more regulated than that.
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.
When California re-regulated the wholesale energy markets after the Enron debacle.
Source: https://www.apep.uci.edu/PDF_Research_Summaries/Impact_Of_El...
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.
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.
Internet access after the telcos were forced to share their last mile fibre?
Telephone roaming charges in the EU.
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).
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).
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.
I think they just want to bring back smoking on planes
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.
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.
Exactly. You can still fly businesses and pay the same price as before, it just became massively more accessible than 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.
Very interesting. A flight from Europe to Sydney, for example, is 1150€ round trip.
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.
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.
So you believe poor people shouldn't be allowed to travel?
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.
Airlines were a lot more expensive everywhere back then. The majority of the drop in airline prices is from improving aircraft. They use ~1/3 the fuel per passenger mile today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/medi...
How much of that "fuel per passenger" metric comes from simply packing passengers tighter?
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.
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.
Alright, you first
I've been doing it, now you join.
Very good example for American centrism. Esspecially as Ryan Air is only operates in Europe.
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.
A good video on the history of the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc
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.
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).
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.
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.
because:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
I much prefer to book directly for air and hotels. If something goes wrong, there's one less level of indirection.
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.
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.
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)
Fun fact: momondo.com is part of Kayak, which is owned by Booking.
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.
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?!?
I use Railboard, exactly like trainline but without the booking fee as it's made by national rail
Thanks for that! Unfortunately UK only? Do you know of similar no-fee apps for pan-European travel?
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.
Vueling doesn't even comply with GDPR on their marketing sign up. It's a singularly terrible experience.
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.
rome2rio.com comes closest to that experience compared to the other services (not affiliated)
To answer side question: try skiplagged.com
How difficult would it be to destroy Booking.com's entire businessmodel or at least their 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.
(from a google search)
Wow! Shows I’m living under a basket.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Is that 1% or 100% of their market? Did they turn a profit?
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...
Almost entirely from hotel reservations. The flight business is a small slice of that.
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.
They’re bigger in Europe
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.
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.
And (South East) Asia
Under the brand name Agoda if I remember correctly
They own Priceline, Kayak, Agoda and a lot of other sites
Ah, thanks. I do use kayak to look up flights (which I then book directly).
At least enough grip on the market to get designated as a gatekeeper under the DMA by the EU [0].
[0] https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/05/13/bookingcom-gatekeep...
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.