Ryanair vs Online Travel Agencies: The Disintermediation Battle

Naturally, the controversy surrounding the cancellation of Ryanair tickets purchased through Online Travel Agencies has plenty of twists and turns, and I assume there is still much to unfold, such as the steps the Travel Agencies themselves will take. When analysing the points of friction, it all stems from the clear drive towards disintermediation, unilaterally imposed by Ryanair and almost all Low-Cost Carriers. The issue lies in the formulas established to impose disintermediation:

No commissions for intermediaries, whether online or offline.
No presence in distribution channels where intermediaries may be involved, whether GDSs or Web Services.

Seen this way, the problem is not new. After all, travel agencies themselves had already established ways to offset reduced or eliminated commissions through service fees. Once this was resolved, all that remained was to have inventory available to sell. The solution came in the form of something called Screen Scraping, which according to Wikipedia is:

a programming technique consisting of taking a presentation of information (usually text, although it may include graphical information) and, through reverse engineering, extracting the data that gave rise to that presentation

In other words, applications that submit queries and periodically crawl the contents of a website, in this case checking its schedules, availability and prices, in order to store them and offer them through a third-party website. The technique is somewhat more complex, as through “trial and error” it simulates booking processes in order to carry out semi-automated transactions with the website. Illegal? Unethical? I do not know. I assume that, had they truly not wanted it, the airlines would have put a stop to these applications. Voilá! Applications emerge claiming to search the websites of more than 60 low-cost airlines simultaneously, offering real-time availability and fares for all of them on a single page. Nor is it now a matter of blaming online agencies for selling airline tickets on low-cost carriers. The crux of it all is customer ownership, and Ryanair, among other companies, seeks to own the customer, when in reality customers are free to choose which product to buy and where to buy it. Imposing this kind of restriction does not exactly benefit Ryanair in the long term, although it probably does in the short term. But customers do not like being tied down, even less so when those ties are the result of commercial strategies that provide them with no value. Who will win the battle? I humbly believe that the battle will be won by whoever is capable of delivering more value to the customer. Ryanair’s values seem to me to be far too closely linked to price. The truth is, I do not want to imagine what would have happened if, instead of Ryanair, it had been a hotel chain

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