Large online booking platforms, such as Booking.com, Kayak and Kiwi, have stopped offering Ryanair flights on their websites since early December, the airline announced on Wednesday.
In the short term, "the sudden removal of our flights" from these websites is expected to lead to a 1% to 2% drop in load factor in December and January, said the airline. However, that should also lead to lower prices, as it eliminates intermediaries.
"Ryanair will respond to this welcome removal of our flights from these websites, by lowering fares where necessary to encourage all passengers to book directly on Ryanair.com where they are guaranteed to always get the lowest airfares," the company said in a press release.
In the longer term, the airline expects "no material impact" on volumes or profit after tax for this financial year, as third-party bookings account for only a small proportion of the total. Earlier, the airline predicted an annual profit between €1.85 billion and €2.05 billion.
Still flying high
The reason behind the removal of Ryanair flights from these websites remains unclear. The company said it may be down to a recent Irish high court ruling, however, which granted Ryanair a permanent injunction against the screenscraper Flightbox from "unlawfully scraping Ryanair.com content" for online travel agents.
However, a lawsuit between Ryanair and several of these booking platform websites is ongoing in the United States.
The company said its flights were still available on some sites, such as Google Flights, which "do not add any hidden mark-ups" and direct consumers to complete their bookings on Ryanair's own website.
On Wednesday, the airline released its latest update showing that passenger numbers rose 9% year on year in December, with the company and its subsidiaries operating 72,500 flights in that month alone (900 flights had to be cancelled due to the violence in the Gaza Strip). This puts Ryanair at 181.8 million passengers for 2023 – 13% up on 2022.
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In Belgium, Ryanair flies into the "two Brussels airports," but is most closely linked to Charleroi Airport. However, the airline has a "confrontational policy with its employees," the unions regularly claimed, leading to a number of strikes over the past years.
Recently, however, an agreement was reached between Ryanair's Belgium-based pilots and the parent company over the pilots' timetables, which was seen as a legal victory for the unions.
