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

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

#51

Post by maccard »

baxtr wrote: post #39
figmert wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

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

#52

Post by com »

mschuster91 wrote: post #43
arghwhat wrote: post #22

> 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 o…

> 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, bookin…

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?!?

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

#53

Post by 2rsf »

ta1243 wrote: post #37
rsynnott wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#54

Post by 2rsf »

rob74 wrote: post #18
lifestyleguru wrote: post #13

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.

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

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

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

#56

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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?

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

#57

Post by mejutoco »

bradvl wrote: post #44

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…

Or selling insurance, renting a car, etc.

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

#58

Post by arghwhat »

wcedmisten wrote: post #49
arghwhat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

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

#59

Post by RyanHamilton »

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.

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

#60

Post by jsiepkes »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #56

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 ag…

> 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.

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