Ryanair will not honour screen-scraped bookings

Ryanair’s ongoing battle with screen-scrapers has taken another twist this week, with the carrier saying it will “introduce new procedures to cancel all passenger bookings made through screen-scraping websites” starting next week.                      The comments came in a statement from the airline confirming that bravofly.com had agreed to stop scraping the Ryanair site. This follows an…

Ryanair‘s ongoing battle with screen-scrapers has taken another twist this week, with the carrier saying it will “introduce new procedures to cancel all passenger bookings made through screen-scraping websites” starting next week.                     


The comments came in a statement from the airline confirming that bravofly.com had agreed to stop scraping the Ryanair site.


This follows an injunction in Germany against V-Tours for doing the same.


Howard Millar, the airline’s chief financial officer, said: “Ryanair is continuing to work with our software providers, Navitaire and Microsoft, to proactively eliminate screen-scraping of Ryanair’s website.”


It is not known whether the site can be ring-fenced to prevent it from being accessed by screen scraping technology.


Similarly, the legal position of a customer who has booked a seat on Ryanair via an unauthorised third party link is unclear.


Millar added that the latest move is “a quicker and more effective way of discouraging this unlawful activity”.