Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
#2They have gone completely and utterly insane. The ONLY way they get custom is through their web site - and now they are trying to put people off.
No matter what the problem was this is the wrong solution.
Re: Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
#3Looks like Ryanair is trying very hard to get customers to use their website, instead of meta searchers that scrape their website. I think however, that they realize the complete opposite. Their website is now even more unusable and meta searchers still include Ryanair tickets.
Re: Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
#4Though this is pretty minor in the scheme of things, I'm constantly surprised at how horrible they can purposefully make the experience and still have people clicking to them. Myself included. From every interview I've seen with MD you get the impression he despises his customers. But they still make money. I guess until someone comes along who can compete and at least pretend they give a damn then it'll continue to work. I wont pretend I know how they could do it but the moment I have another option, Ryanair have lost me for ever.
Re: Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
#5Though this is pretty minor in the scheme of things, I'm constantly surprised at how horrible they can purposefully make the experience and still have people clicking to them. Myself included. From every interview I've seen with MD you get the impression he despises his customers. But they still make money. I guess until someone comes along who can compete and at least pretend they give a damn then it'll continue to…
Whenever I've had the choice between EasyJet and Ryanair, I've always chosen EasyJet. They're a bit more expensive but at least I don't feel as much treated as cattle.
Re: Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
#6Amazing to throw away more and more usability in their platform and still retain customers because their price scheme is cheap.
I guess their budget is not good enough to hire a good programer. I wonder if the CEO hire his nephew, the one with some frontpage/dreamweaver skills for the job.
Re: Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
#7To put people who may not know Ryanair in context: is a low-cost Irish airline that operates in Europe. You can get round trip flights starting at EUR 0.01. His CEO is a very controversial person who has been on the press for suggesting aggressive measures to make air travel even cheaper, like run flights where passengers stand during the journey, removing toilets from aircrafts and the most recent one, providing paid porn movies on board. Once, I travel Madrid-Paris with them for less than 20 euros. Most of their fleet are Boeing 737-800.
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair
Re: Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
#8They have gone completely and utterly insane. The ONLY way they get custom is through their web site - and now they are trying to put people off. No matter what the problem was this is the wrong solution.
Actually, I don't think that'll happen.
Who flies with Ryanair ? People trying to save money. If their website is too easy to use, these people will peruse it for hours, trying to find out the cheaper combination of flights to go from "somewhere near Madrid" to "somewhere near Berlin".
If RA raises the bar a little bit, these people will probably give up one or two queries earlier, hence picking some more "natural" route that will likely make RA a bit more money. Most customers won't think (or know) about the competition, RA has a very strong brand, so the chances that they'll just give up and go elsewhere are fairly slim, especially after having invested all that time going through captchas.
Captchas are very unfriendly towards older and less computer-literate people, but those segments are more likely to go through phone or agencies anyway.
(Not that I care, I stopped using RA years ago.)
Re: Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
#9They don't like scrapers, they don't even allow links to their website without permission.
From their TOS:
"5. Links to this website. You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair."
Re: Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
#10Amazing to throw away more and more usability in their platform and still retain customers because their price scheme is cheap. I guess their budget is not good enough to hire a good programer. I wonder if the CEO hire his nephew, the one with some frontpage/dreamweaver skills for the job.
They just don't care about "good anything", they only care about cheap. If it was practical for them to provide only a telnet server, they would do it in a heartbeat.