The Irish High Court issued an order on Wednesday, March 4, recording binding undertakings from the travel agency eDreams to cease all access to Ryanair’s flight booking system and stop using third parties to access it.
The accusation against eDreams
The court order comes after the low-cost carrier’s application for injunctions to restrain the Spanish-based online travel agency (OTA) eDreams and two other companies from using Ryanair’s new “Travel Agent Direct” (TAD) booking system.
According to the airline, the TAD system is a secure, offline distribution platform that is not publicly available and is intended only for brick-and-mortar travel agencies handling customer calls. Ryanair accused eDreams of unlawfully accessing the system through third parties to place bookings it could not otherwise make.
The carrier reportedly became suspicious that the TAD was being exploited after an unusually high number of bookings were placed by PT Scan and Geelong, two agencies with accounts on the platform. Based in Indonesia and Australia, respectively, the two companies are also defendants in the court case.
The court case
Following the court order, eDreams agreed to stop using Ryanair’s TAD system, including through third parties, and to cease any activity if such is detected to occur.
Ryanair’s Chief Marketing Officer, Dara Brady, commented that:
“Today’s High Court Order is a welcome development that prevents eDreams from unlawfully accessing Ryanair’s TAD booking systems. Ryanair will continue to take action to protect consumers from overcharging and from the misleading practices of screenscraping OTAs such as eDreams.”
Ryanair also stated that it has repeatedly offered eDreams free API access (Application Programming Interface) to its fares if the online agency accepts the transparency standards that other Ryanair-approved OTAs have – but “eDreams continues to ignore” the offer, according to the airline.
At the time of writing, eDreams has not commented publicly on this recent legal development.
What do you think of this case? Have you ever used eDreams to book a Ryanair flight? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!
