"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 got to the payment page and they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread in the exchange rate I rage quit. I should have known better even then, but now I will only use them if I have literally no other choice. With luck that means "never."
I'm always happy to see the various EU competition authorities pushing back on this kind of thing.
> 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.
This isn't anything new though. Been like that for the last 15 years at least. Always pay in the local currency (your bank/visa/mastercard will give you a better rate then the merchant)
It seems to be built into the credit card terminals. So it's a visa thing, not on the shop.
I had that with very small shops in non-touristy areas of Mexico where it was absolutely clear to not be a scam attempts by the shops owner. They had no idea what the terminal asked.
I don't think parent is claiming that the shop owner is trying to scam someone. But these prompts have been around for at least 15 years, I'm also sure about that, this isn't new by any measure. And yeah, also came across shop owners who don't know what it is about, and then you have to chose.
Makes sense that shop owners in non-touristy areas haven't seen them before, as you'll only see that when the card has a default currency that differs from the default currency of the terminal.
On the other hand, almost every merchant and waiter in Spain told me, when handing me the card terminal, to select "local currency" (decline the first swindle attempt) then "don't convert" (decline the second swindle attempt). There's obviously some required workflow where they must pass the terminal to the customer, but they are wise to the payment gateway's trick to extract additional value from the transaction. They don't want their customer bilked, or to take the reputational damage when the customer leaves an angry review.
So if your Mexican merchants "don't know" what their terminal says? Either you were their first foreigner, or they're useful idiots, or they know.
This isn’t that. I understand if you came to a US store with Canadian dollars, they’d be unlikely to give you the posted exchange rate for them, if the took them at all. Here we’re talking about paying with a credit card that will automatically pay in the local currency, and having the POS terminal, on whoever’s behalf, try and intermediate that to charge a higher rate than the credit card would have, under the false pretence of simplifying payment somehow. It’s not convenience, it’s preying on ignorance.
ATMs all over are like this. Very annoying. I have to decline conversation all the time. The ATM conversation rate is usually 15-25% markup. No thanks, my bank charges nothing, just passes on the Visa 1% fee for fx.
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 astute punters exactly how (and how much) they are paying for the service. I'd like to see that outlawed and direct costs of the exchange up front (e.g. "Exchange £100 for $121.5 at a cost of £10 compared to the base rate")
Do they suggest that you pay in your home currency, or do they give you the choice to select on the ATM? Only once a cashier made a suggestion and it was to warn me of the spread and that generally it'd be better to do it in USD and let my bank do conversion.
You get a prompt on the terminal. I’ve never had a cashier suggest anything to me, and I don’t really want their input. The correct answer is always pay in local currency and let your bank handle it.
I once came across a cashier that thought you had to select the foreign currency option. When I tried to pay in the local currency she cancelled the transaction.
Needed to get another member of staff to explain to her that the local currency option would work fine.
The one I found most devious was the ATMs in Stansted that offers to pay out Euro. I was going to Spain and knew I would need some cash on arrival, so I thought I could save a bit of time. They had cleverly swapped the exchange rate so in big letters they showed a reasonable figure, like 0.85 and then in smaller type in the corner showed that actually it was in favour of Euros, so you would pay over 350 pounds for 300 euros. I luckily realised in time, but I expect a lot of people don't. Also it's drilled in from the bad old days that you need to take out cash before going on holiday to avoid being scammed. A whole exploitive service industry seems to exist solely on that misconception.
The only place in I've had any troubles paying with card (or easily find a cashmachine) in recent time have been Turkey outside the big cities.
I’m not defending this behaviour with Ryanair, but this is not unique to them at all. It’s an industry “standard”. I’m Irish but live in the UK - when we make card transactions it asks what currency we want to pay in, and hides the exchange rate spread.
> I will only use them if I have literally no other choice
Even with the £20 increase they were likely cheaper than the alternative, if it exists. If this is going to push you into not using them, basically every other airline will be ruled out for you. EasyJet are exactly the same. BA/KLM/Air France/Aer Lingus are all the same on their short hop flights (I’ve actually never flown Lufthansa so I can’t comment on them). The short haul European routes are a race to the bottom.
To be clear, the currency scam was a last straw, not the major dark pattern.
When you compare list prices for flights with them versus almost any other airline you are comparing apples with oranges. The only way to figure out exactly what you'll pay is to go through the entirety of their checkout procedure. My experiences with those other airlines for short haul flights are quite different.
It's easy to book a Ryanair ticket without being upsold. You select the ticket, probably add a bag for about £40, skip the car rental and hotels screens etc, then book. What's the problem?
So you're using Ryanair's own-issued payment card, to avoid the mandatory fees it charges for every other payment option?
You forgot to mention picking the "No I don't need travel insurance" option shoved in the middle of the list of travel insurance prices, which defaults to you buying travel insurance from Ryanair.
Do you already have their spyware app installed and tracking you on your phone, to avoid being charged £50 for a plain boarding pass which you print yourself?
You're describing some other airline's website, surely. If you'd used Ryanair's site you would not be unaware of its fuckery.
He's very good at marketing his airline (often with outrage inspiring press releases) and very good at finding ways to squeeze more blood out of the stone of budget travellers. I don't really care whether he's "good" or "bad" but I would like to see the regulators shut down more of these aggressive tactics as they emerge.
I just wish the airlines were forced to put their booking behind an API so we could book flights without having to go through mazes that are different for every airline.
I have found myself to be the only person in many conversations defending Ryanair. People complain about legroom, everything being a paid add-ons, you name it. The key is to treat it like a bus that takes you from A to B, sometimes cheaper than a bus, not some sort of luxury experience. The times when flying was luxury is over. And I benefitted from it greatly as a student, so have many shown by Ryanair's passenger numbers.
And I am also always confused about the non-transparency that people mention about their fees. When you do the checkout, you select the services you want and pay for those. There used to be a time when other airlines would have a lot of things included in the basic ticket price, but that's not the case anymore, so it's not different. And I think this was an inevitable in an industry with small profit margins where price differentiation would bring gains.
This is an odd story. Ryanair doesn't pay commission, so these resellers make money by charging extra fees to unsuspecting customers. I don't know why Ryanair wants to stamp out this practice (which doesn't cost them anything and brings extra sales), but I don't see why they should be prevented from stamping it out.
Ryanair (and to an extent other LCCs) generally doesn't like ticket sales through resellers because a substantial part of its profit margin comes from upsell of add-ons and partner services during the booking/reservation process
I guess because travel agencies need to be able to show customers the most economical flights?
By prohibiting agencies on their website, they can not give consumers (through their agents) the ability to compare different choices.
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 you avoid all the extras, including bottled water.
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 end it was Kiwi who sent me the rest, and in my view they truly are parasites (they also got a Covid loan from the Czech government). Maybe in the days of Skypicker when their search engine was good they provided some value, but nowadays I advise everyone to avoid them.
Yes, after the flurry of Covid cancellations I avoid using OTAs. Where we had flights booked direct with the airlines getting our money back was much swifter than where we had gone through an intermediary. Also EU bookings were much quicker to refund than US ones.
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.
That's non-compliant with GDPR. When shown to EU readers, they cannot block access based on accepting a privacy policy. Only essential cookies that really are needed for it to function are required.
Amusingly my voluntary subscription was just under the cut-off amount and I cancelled it as soon as this came in. I bought a subscription to The Economist instead.
Did they really already get rid of all the laws EU enforced upon them before they left? One would think it'd take a decade at least, but I guess things can move fast when the government really wants to.
The way regulation works in the EU is typically EU comes up with regulation for countries to implement, then they implement the laws via their national system, then everything is handled "locally". So just leaving the EU doesn't mean that all of those things just stop being active, you need to go through the process of removing the local laws before.
Well, I think Meta was the first to give it a try, and given that they had to revise it to not be like that (these changes incoming in January it seems https://www.euractiv.com/news/meta-to-tweak-its-pay-or-conse...), it seems to not be much of a gray area anymore, otherwise Facebook would continue offering that choice to users.
> The social media giant was fined €200 million in April for breaching the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) over the binary choice it gives EU users to either pay to access ad-free versions of the platforms or agree to being tracked and profiled for Meta’s ads.
> In a press statement, the Commission said the revised offer would give users an “effective choice” between consenting to their personal data being used to show them fully personalised ads or handing over less personal data and seeing “more limited personalised advertising”.
Seems like there will be a more nuanced choice available in January, than "pay us or we'll track you"
I know it happens in other countries, but can you actually get away with this in a civilized and non-authoritarian country today? Eventually you're gonna have to do/say something about it, if people keep opening up new cases about it.
Who's going to open a case and where? Is there any point in complaining to a local authority in an EU country about an UK web site? Esp since the guardian probably has zero business presence on the continent...
If you're a UK citizen, and you see UK law being broken you report that to your local authorities. I'm not sure where other EU countries come into the context?
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?
"Ryanair’s tactics included rolling out facial recognition procedures for people who bought tickets via a third party, claiming that was necessary for security. It then “totally or intermittently blocked booking attempts by travel agencies”, including by blocking payment methods and mass-deleting accounts.
The airline then “imposed partnership agreements” on agencies which banned sales of Ryanair flights in combinations with other carriers, and blocked bookings to force them to sign up. Only in April this year did it allow agencies’ websites to link up with its own services, allowing effective competition.
The competition authority said Ryanair’s actions had “blocked, hindered or made such purchases more difficult and/or economically or technically burdensome when combined with flights operated by other carriers and/or other tourism and insurance services”.
Big companies often try to lock down distribution where they can, especially when margins are tight and competition is fierce. But trying to strong-arm OTAs isn’t a smart long-term strategy. It hurts consumer choice and pushes prices up for travelers who just want easy comparison and booking.
From a business perspective, I get why Ryanair would want more direct control - fewer fees, more customer data, stronger branding. But the moment you start restricting where people can buy your product, you step into antitrust territory and risk killing the very demand you’re trying to secure. Travel is already stressful enough without making it harder to find good deals. For most people, accessibility and transparency matter more than who gets to capture the commission. Punishing intermediaries almost always ends up punishing the customer instead.
So from a fairness and consumer standpoint, this fine seems justified. And as a frequent traveler, I just want all the options, not gatekeeping.
And who cleans up the mess when OTAs miss emails, get passenger details wrong, display outdated prices or add markup through algorithmic pricing? Ludicrously one sided take.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an airline take responsibility for a TA’s mistakes. Usually they just send you back to wherever you bought the ticket. And there are other ways to influence the quality of how aggregators and travel agencies operate, instead of just bluntly trying to block or restrict them.
https://archive.ph/eipFD
"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 got to the payment page and they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread in the exchange rate I rage quit. I should have known better even then, but now I will only use them if I have literally no other choice. With luck that means "never."
I'm always happy to see the various EU competition authorities pushing back on this kind of thing.
> 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.
This isn't anything new though. Been like that for the last 15 years at least. Always pay in the local currency (your bank/visa/mastercard will give you a better rate then the merchant)
It seems to be built into the credit card terminals. So it's a visa thing, not on the shop.
I had that with very small shops in non-touristy areas of Mexico where it was absolutely clear to not be a scam attempts by the shops owner. They had no idea what the terminal asked.
I don't think parent is claiming that the shop owner is trying to scam someone. But these prompts have been around for at least 15 years, I'm also sure about that, this isn't new by any measure. And yeah, also came across shop owners who don't know what it is about, and then you have to chose.
Makes sense that shop owners in non-touristy areas haven't seen them before, as you'll only see that when the card has a default currency that differs from the default currency of the terminal.
On the other hand, almost every merchant and waiter in Spain told me, when handing me the card terminal, to select "local currency" (decline the first swindle attempt) then "don't convert" (decline the second swindle attempt). There's obviously some required workflow where they must pass the terminal to the customer, but they are wise to the payment gateway's trick to extract additional value from the transaction. They don't want their customer bilked, or to take the reputational damage when the customer leaves an angry review.
So if your Mexican merchants "don't know" what their terminal says? Either you were their first foreigner, or they're useful idiots, or they know.
> Been like that for the last 15 years at least
Charging significantly more to accept foreign currencies goes back thousands of years.
This isn’t that. I understand if you came to a US store with Canadian dollars, they’d be unlikely to give you the posted exchange rate for them, if the took them at all. Here we’re talking about paying with a credit card that will automatically pay in the local currency, and having the POS terminal, on whoever’s behalf, try and intermediate that to charge a higher rate than the credit card would have, under the false pretence of simplifying payment somehow. It’s not convenience, it’s preying on ignorance.
Ubiquitous currency exchange at the point of sale does not though.
ATMs all over are like this. Very annoying. I have to decline conversation all the time. The ATM conversation rate is usually 15-25% markup. No thanks, my bank charges nothing, just passes on the Visa 1% fee for fx.
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 astute punters exactly how (and how much) they are paying for the service. I'd like to see that outlawed and direct costs of the exchange up front (e.g. "Exchange £100 for $121.5 at a cost of £10 compared to the base rate")
Do they suggest that you pay in your home currency, or do they give you the choice to select on the ATM? Only once a cashier made a suggestion and it was to warn me of the spread and that generally it'd be better to do it in USD and let my bank do conversion.
You get a prompt on the terminal. I’ve never had a cashier suggest anything to me, and I don’t really want their input. The correct answer is always pay in local currency and let your bank handle it.
I once came across a cashier that thought you had to select the foreign currency option. When I tried to pay in the local currency she cancelled the transaction.
Needed to get another member of staff to explain to her that the local currency option would work fine.
The one I found most devious was the ATMs in Stansted that offers to pay out Euro. I was going to Spain and knew I would need some cash on arrival, so I thought I could save a bit of time. They had cleverly swapped the exchange rate so in big letters they showed a reasonable figure, like 0.85 and then in smaller type in the corner showed that actually it was in favour of Euros, so you would pay over 350 pounds for 300 euros. I luckily realised in time, but I expect a lot of people don't. Also it's drilled in from the bad old days that you need to take out cash before going on holiday to avoid being scammed. A whole exploitive service industry seems to exist solely on that misconception.
The only place in I've had any troubles paying with card (or easily find a cashmachine) in recent time have been Turkey outside the big cities.
I’m not defending this behaviour with Ryanair, but this is not unique to them at all. It’s an industry “standard”. I’m Irish but live in the UK - when we make card transactions it asks what currency we want to pay in, and hides the exchange rate spread.
> I will only use them if I have literally no other choice
Even with the £20 increase they were likely cheaper than the alternative, if it exists. If this is going to push you into not using them, basically every other airline will be ruled out for you. EasyJet are exactly the same. BA/KLM/Air France/Aer Lingus are all the same on their short hop flights (I’ve actually never flown Lufthansa so I can’t comment on them). The short haul European routes are a race to the bottom.
To be clear, the currency scam was a last straw, not the major dark pattern.
When you compare list prices for flights with them versus almost any other airline you are comparing apples with oranges. The only way to figure out exactly what you'll pay is to go through the entirety of their checkout procedure. My experiences with those other airlines for short haul flights are quite different.
> Even with the £20 increase they were likely cheaper than the alternative, if it exists.
Honestly, on many routes, I think this is true far less often than it used to be.
Ryanair was fastest airline when refunding tickets at start of pandemic. Lufthansa just ghosted me.
OTAs were blocked because they just run scam, and Ryanair customer supports had many problems with dealing with them.
Some example from Kiwi:
- if flight gets cancelled and refunded, OTA pockets the refund, does not give anything to custemer
- OTA does not provide customer with email used to make booking. Makes any changes like extra luggage or seat difficult
- If flight gets rescheduled, OTA may not inform customer
- Not possible to add extra child etc...
I would only use OTA like Kiwi when booking flight in very exotic country, and I have no idea how to checkin in chinese.
It's easy to book a Ryanair ticket without being upsold. You select the ticket, probably add a bag for about £40, skip the car rental and hotels screens etc, then book. What's the problem?
So you're using Ryanair's own-issued payment card, to avoid the mandatory fees it charges for every other payment option?
You forgot to mention picking the "No I don't need travel insurance" option shoved in the middle of the list of travel insurance prices, which defaults to you buying travel insurance from Ryanair.
Do you already have their spyware app installed and tracking you on your phone, to avoid being charged £50 for a plain boarding pass which you print yourself?
You're describing some other airline's website, surely. If you'd used Ryanair's site you would not be unaware of its fuckery.
You're a few years out of date. You don't get charged extra for using any credit card.
And clicking "I don't need insurance" is easy.
Right. O'Leary is an antihero at best and a villain at worst.
He's very good at marketing his airline (often with outrage inspiring press releases) and very good at finding ways to squeeze more blood out of the stone of budget travellers. I don't really care whether he's "good" or "bad" but I would like to see the regulators shut down more of these aggressive tactics as they emerge.
I just wish the airlines were forced to put their booking behind an API so we could book flights without having to go through mazes that are different for every airline.
I have found myself to be the only person in many conversations defending Ryanair. People complain about legroom, everything being a paid add-ons, you name it. The key is to treat it like a bus that takes you from A to B, sometimes cheaper than a bus, not some sort of luxury experience. The times when flying was luxury is over. And I benefitted from it greatly as a student, so have many shown by Ryanair's passenger numbers.
And I am also always confused about the non-transparency that people mention about their fees. When you do the checkout, you select the services you want and pay for those. There used to be a time when other airlines would have a lot of things included in the basic ticket price, but that's not the case anymore, so it's not different. And I think this was an inevitable in an industry with small profit margins where price differentiation would bring gains.
This is an odd story. Ryanair doesn't pay commission, so these resellers make money by charging extra fees to unsuspecting customers. I don't know why Ryanair wants to stamp out this practice (which doesn't cost them anything and brings extra sales), but I don't see why they should be prevented from stamping it out.
Ryanair (and to an extent other LCCs) generally doesn't like ticket sales through resellers because a substantial part of its profit margin comes from upsell of add-ons and partner services during the booking/reservation process
Thanks, that makes sense.
Why isn't Ryanair allowed to prohibit use of their website by resellers?
I guess because travel agencies need to be able to show customers the most economical flights? By prohibiting agencies on their website, they can not give consumers (through their agents) the ability to compare different choices.
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 you avoid all the extras, including bottled water.
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 end it was Kiwi who sent me the rest, and in my view they truly are parasites (they also got a Covid loan from the Czech government). Maybe in the days of Skypicker when their search engine was good they provided some value, but nowadays I advise everyone to avoid them.
Yes, after the flurry of Covid cancellations I avoid using OTAs. Where we had flights booked direct with the airlines getting our money back was much swifter than where we had gone through an intermediary. Also EU bookings were much quicker to refund than US ones.
Had a very similar experience with eDreams. Absolute scammers, in hindsight it was foolish to trust an unnecessary middleman.
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.
Hmm the guardian has gone "accept tracking or subscribe".
I wonder how that works out for them.
I also wonder if the time is ripe for some company to disrupt advertising by simply doing what google did on launch in 2000.
I didn’t know you were allowed to do that with cookies.
Why wouldn't they be allowed to do it?
You have the choice of not viewing the website.
That's non-compliant with GDPR. When shown to EU readers, they cannot block access based on accepting a privacy policy. Only essential cookies that really are needed for it to function are required.
There's been some GDPR-related rulings in EU courts which seem to be allowing this kind of thing at least by some interpretations.
UK site. Not in the EU any more.
They're doing business in the EU.
Amusingly my voluntary subscription was just under the cut-off amount and I cancelled it as soon as this came in. I bought a subscription to The Economist instead.
Did they really already get rid of all the laws EU enforced upon them before they left? One would think it'd take a decade at least, but I guess things can move fast when the government really wants to.
The way regulation works in the EU is typically EU comes up with regulation for countries to implement, then they implement the laws via their national system, then everything is handled "locally". So just leaving the EU doesn't mean that all of those things just stop being active, you need to go through the process of removing the local laws before.
They did not. The rules are still basically the same just from a practicality point of view.
Have seen this in EU sites too. It seems to be a grey area at present.
Well, I think Meta was the first to give it a try, and given that they had to revise it to not be like that (these changes incoming in January it seems https://www.euractiv.com/news/meta-to-tweak-its-pay-or-conse...), it seems to not be much of a gray area anymore, otherwise Facebook would continue offering that choice to users.
> The social media giant was fined €200 million in April for breaching the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) over the binary choice it gives EU users to either pay to access ad-free versions of the platforms or agree to being tracked and profiled for Meta’s ads.
> In a press statement, the Commission said the revised offer would give users an “effective choice” between consenting to their personal data being used to show them fully personalised ads or handing over less personal data and seeing “more limited personalised advertising”.
Seems like there will be a more nuanced choice available in January, than "pay us or we'll track you"
... or no one bothers to enforce them any more?
UK gov is too busy enforcing the death of anonymity online anyway.
> ... or no one bothers to enforce them any more?
I know it happens in other countries, but can you actually get away with this in a civilized and non-authoritarian country today? Eventually you're gonna have to do/say something about it, if people keep opening up new cases about it.
Who's going to open a case and where? Is there any point in complaining to a local authority in an EU country about an UK web site? Esp since the guardian probably has zero business presence on the continent...
If you're a UK citizen, and you see UK law being broken you report that to your local authorities. I'm not sure where other EU countries come into the context?
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?
They'll contest it and won't pay it. Post again when they actually transfer the money lol
"Dear passengers, please have your credit card ready for the landing."
TLDR
"Ryanair’s tactics included rolling out facial recognition procedures for people who bought tickets via a third party, claiming that was necessary for security. It then “totally or intermittently blocked booking attempts by travel agencies”, including by blocking payment methods and mass-deleting accounts. The airline then “imposed partnership agreements” on agencies which banned sales of Ryanair flights in combinations with other carriers, and blocked bookings to force them to sign up. Only in April this year did it allow agencies’ websites to link up with its own services, allowing effective competition. The competition authority said Ryanair’s actions had “blocked, hindered or made such purchases more difficult and/or economically or technically burdensome when combined with flights operated by other carriers and/or other tourism and insurance services”.
[dead]
Big companies often try to lock down distribution where they can, especially when margins are tight and competition is fierce. But trying to strong-arm OTAs isn’t a smart long-term strategy. It hurts consumer choice and pushes prices up for travelers who just want easy comparison and booking.
From a business perspective, I get why Ryanair would want more direct control - fewer fees, more customer data, stronger branding. But the moment you start restricting where people can buy your product, you step into antitrust territory and risk killing the very demand you’re trying to secure. Travel is already stressful enough without making it harder to find good deals. For most people, accessibility and transparency matter more than who gets to capture the commission. Punishing intermediaries almost always ends up punishing the customer instead.
So from a fairness and consumer standpoint, this fine seems justified. And as a frequent traveler, I just want all the options, not gatekeeping.
And who cleans up the mess when OTAs miss emails, get passenger details wrong, display outdated prices or add markup through algorithmic pricing? Ludicrously one sided take.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an airline take responsibility for a TA’s mistakes. Usually they just send you back to wherever you bought the ticket. And there are other ways to influence the quality of how aggregators and travel agencies operate, instead of just bluntly trying to block or restrict them.
Is there any way to report AI slop accounts on HN? This entire account is generic AI slop comments.
I agree. Report it via email hn@ycombinator.com to @dang.
You guys don't have any other problems than looking for AI slops in every message on HN?
Why do you think I am an AI slop? If you don't like my opinion , it doesn't mean I am AI.
The issue is not about liking your opinion. It's about use of AI to produce an opinion.
I might be behind on modern tech, but what exactly gives me away as AI? I’m genuinely curious.