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Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs

theguardian.com

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Re: Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs

#81

Post by BloondAndDoom »

dcminter wrote: post #4

"O’Leary accused the travel agent industry of scamming and ripping off unsuspecting consumers by charging extra fees and markups on ticket prices." That is ... pretty rich. A couple of years ago I was going to go see my brother in the UK who lived near Stansted. As such Ryanair would have been the most convenient airline. The shere number of dark patterns I encountered trying to book the ticket was such that when I g…

I still don’t know why all these dark patterns are simply not illegal. What happened to consumer rights? It be a such a widespread practice, I think we will look back at this at one point and will say things akin “how did we let people smoke in planes”. One of those things utterly ridiculous in hindsight

Re: Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs

#82

Post by philipwhiuk »

halapro wrote: post #75
dwood_dev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had ever purchased a RyanAir ticket you would understand. You get up charged for everything and have to deselect all the up charges at multiple screens. It is their operating model to sell basically free seats, and profit on upsells. Third parties eliminate a large portion of their upsell pipeline. Ryanair is cheap, they charge extra for everything. But the tradeoff is you get where you are going for cheap if…

The funny part is how most OTAs are pretty awful with addons themselves. I know for a fact that certain OTAs will sell tickets at a loss hoping you trip up on one of their checkboxes, like the 15€ automatic checkin service many offer. I just now booked a ticket on gotogate, paid 80 euro and received a receipt from ITA airways for 120 euro. They apparently lost 40 euro on this sale, I only had to click "no" on about 1…

Go To Gate are on my ban list personally for awful behaviour when a flight was cancelled.

Re: Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs

#83

Post by philipwhiuk »

jakubmazanec wrote: post #11

Just before Covid when everything was cancelled I booked some tickets through Kiwi and it was the worst decision - I spent year (!) getting my money back. I'm not saying Ryanair is a good company, but for their flight (i.e. one of those which I booked through Kiwi) they reimbursed me immediately. The second flight was EasyJet and they said they already sent the refund to Kiwi, while Kiwi said they got nothing. In the…

Compare and contrast with: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46364852

Re: Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs

#84

Post by rantallion »

dcminter wrote: post #9
andy99 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread I’m finding this more and more. Uber does it, and even Walgreens does it when I’m in the US and tap my card it suggests that I pay in my home currency. This seems to be a new vector companies have found for ripping off their customers.

Point of sale terminals also do this when travelling - it wasn't especially surprising, just one straw too many. Of course foreign exchange offices have been doing this scam since forever ("no fees!")... --- Edit - note that with a bureau d'exchange my objection is not that they charge for the exchange; clearly that is the exact business that they are in. It's the "no fees" etc. marketing that hides from the less ast…

> direct costs of the exchange up front

Isn't that fairly easy to estimate? If they're showing you a buy rate and a sell rate, you know the interbank rate is going to be pretty much halfway between the two. I don't think anyone's changing money and thinking the bureau isn't profiting.

Re: Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs

#85

Post by crazygringo »

yakkomajuri wrote: post #30

It is of course ironic since we're talking about Ryanair here but I'm genuinely curious as to why it's abusive to determine that your product/service must be sold via your platform? Legitimately welcoming discussion here as I'm keen to hear the other side.

Yeah, generally speaking the last thing I want to do is to defend RyanAir but I don't see how what they're doing here is wrong.

I see no way in which this is abusing a "dominant" market position. If you only want to sell tickets via your own site, what on earth could be wrong with that?

Re: Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs

#87

Post by Kwpolska »

testing22321 wrote: post #73
hexbin010 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ryanair weren't just a bystander in this race to the bottom, they were primary drivers of creating it, along with Easyjet, undercutting competition and forcing everyone else to become a low cost carrier. They're a total success commercially you can't deny it, but my god what a horrible experience for everyone involved, passengers and staff alike

Like the comment you are replying to said - if you don’t want super cheap prices and super cheap service, fly with a more expensive carrier. Qantas, emirates, etc etc. You get what you pay for .

Legacy carriers run a hub-and-spoke model. Ryanair specialises in direct flights. If I can choose between a direct flight with Ryanair, or a connecting flight with a legacy airline, I'm going to choose the former to limit time spent in airports.

Re: Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs

#88

Post by bgbntty2 »

andy99 wrote: post #8
dcminter wrote: post #4

"O’Leary accused the travel agent industry of scamming and ripping off unsuspecting consumers by charging extra fees and markups on ticket prices." That is ... pretty rich. A couple of years ago I was going to go see my brother in the UK who lived near Stansted. As such Ryanair would have been the most convenient airline. The shere number of dark patterns I encountered trying to book the ticket was such that when I g…

> they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread I’m finding this more and more. Uber does it, and even Walgreens does it when I’m in the US and tap my card it suggests that I pay in my home currency. This seems to be a new vector companies have found for ripping off their customers.

Years ago when paying with PayPal, there were 2 choices - for them to convert currencies or to rely on my bank to convert them. There was a warning that if I chose the second option, it could cost a lot. Turns out, with my bank the conversion was good and with PayPal's conversion I'd lose like 10%.

Stuff like that is what I say "years ago" - I haven't used PayPal for a while now, and I won't use it again.

Re: Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs

#89

Post by hluska »

embedding-shape wrote: post #67
nottorp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of this thread where I'm hypothesising that it's either legal or not enforced in the UK. An EU citizen may have grounds to complain if it's illegal in their jurisdiction, but to who?

You said: > ... or no one bothers to enforce them any more? Which is strange, because why wouldn't the UK enforce UK law? There is no such thing as "EU-wide laws" as I previously explained, so again I'm not sure why other EU citizens are being pulled into context here, it literally doesn't matter. If no one is enforcing UK law, then obviously that's bad, but on another level. I'm not sure what point you're trying to…

I can’t figure out why you’re being simultaneously argumentative and dismissive. But you’re being argumentative and dismissive while talking about a totally different subject than the person you’re replying to.

EU citizens would have reason to be concerned about this. It’s not clear how an EU citizen would deal with this nor is it clear this would even be prohibited since there have been some recent rulings that muddy this. Nor is it even clear there would be a UK response since certain kinds of analytics are fine under UK GDPR.

You’ve taken something very interesting and open to interpretation and reduced it down to circular arguments. That’s boring.

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