Airline Cancels All Flights Booked Through Third-Party Systems 410
TechDirt is reporting that one airline is planning on canceling all flights booked through third-party systems. This isn't the first time that an airline has fought against the inevitable wave of easier-to-search third party websites, but certainly tops the stupid scale. "We were already confused enough by American Airlines' desire not to be listed on the sites where people search for airfare, and easyJet's plan to sue the sites that send it customers, but Irish-based airline Ryanair is taking this all to a new level. Beyond just being upset about those 3rd party sites (i.e., sites that send it business!), it's planning to cancel the flights for everyone who booked through one of those services."
perfect business (Score:5, Informative)
We'd have ourselves a perfect business system if it wasn't for those pesky customers messing things up.
Re:Marketing gone wild ? (Score:5, Informative)
You'd think they'd need all the help they could get. Still, they are Irish ... (dons his flameproof underwear ready for the inevitable politically correct flamers).
That's probably true, but it won't be us (the Irish) modding you down, we'll all be drunkenly laughing at your comments, blame the racist mods who think the Irish can't take a joke.
Re:I am with Ryanair on this (Score:4, Informative)
But if, like me, your credit card is an Egg Card you can't book directly on the Ryanair website. Egg are not accepting transactions from Ryanair because Ryanair's security is so bad.
Not that it really matters. By the time you've paid all their hidden charges (e.g. for checking in!) Ryanair aren't much cheaper than anyone else and their service is truly abysmal. I won't be flying with them again.
Re:Maybe this is not so unreasonable (Score:1, Informative)
After clicking past the blog speedbump to the actual article [independent.ie] I can see why the airline is doing this. The airline has their own website which handles the booking and also ties in other services like hotels, car rentals, insurance, and so on. These third party websites aren't going through an established booking system, instead they are screen scraping and acting as a front-end to the airline's website. This would be like a third party mirroring Slashdot's stories without Slashdot's advertisements, costing Slashdot revenue.
It's not like that at all. The airlines are selling a product that generates revenue.
The screen scrapers are actually providing customers a way to buy the things that generate revenue.
So the Airline ties in hotel rentals...
Don't you think people would be upset if the Hotels started stating they would cancel reservations / refuse to honor the rates made through third-party sites (like the airlines' sites) ??
Re:Well, if that's the way they want it (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well, if that's the way they want it (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know how they plan on winnning that battle by turning away paying customers (Maybe they have enough time to fill the seats with normal customers). Anyway, no one had played devil's advocate yet, so here it is.
Re:Well, if that's the way they want it (Score:5, Informative)
When I go on my honeymoon to BC (I'm east coast), I'm going to have to fly *again*.
The trans-Canada Rocky Mountain tours [canadaviarail.com] are very romantic.
Re:One way or the other, it's asking for trouble (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked with people that had to fly weekly as part of their job. Say you're trying to fly from ..oh.. I dunno.. Atlanta to Dallas. That flight might be $750. However, you can get a trip from Atlanta to Houston, with a stop in Dallas, for $400. (I'm making up these numbers btw, just using them as an example). So said instructor would purchase tickets for the atlanta to houston flight, and just walk off the plane in Dallas. Of course, this only works if you have no checked baggage, but for what they're charging for that these days......
Airline ticket prices are tricky though. It's a rare product that increases in value the closer you get to departure time. It will go from it's highest value to worthless in a moment's time. If you just figure out a reasonable average fare and charge that from the beginning, you'll sell out all your seats 3+ weeks prior to departure. That might seem fine from a business perspective, but you always have customers that absolutely must fly with only a day's ... or even a few hours notice. Obviously these customers are willing to pay top dollar, so you want tickets available for them. But not TOO many tickets, otherwise you'll have empty seats, becuase the demand at those high prices aren't there. So tickets will increase in price the closer you get to departure. Buy them far enough in advance, you get a great deal.
Now, take the multi-leg flight I used as an example. What you really have here is two separate flights. Atlanta to Dallas, and Dallas to Houston. You've also got NYC to Dallas, LAX to Dallas, etc. So 3 weeks out, you've got the Dallas to houston flight that's got a surplus of seats. You have 15 extra seats that you project you're not going to be able to fill on that flight. On each of the 3 flights to dallas, you expect a surplus of 5 seats. You want to fill up ALL the planes. However, if you lower just the cost of the tickets to Dallas, you're not going to fill the Houston leg. So you lower the cost of the tickets from atlanta, nyc and lax to houston that have a layover in Dallas, thereby increasing demand on that specific flight, and filling the seats. So why not just lower the cost of the Dallas to Houston flights? The problem is, other than the 15 extra seats, you're filling the plane anyway. Why offer the other 100+ seats in the plane at a lower rate when those customers are perfectly willing to pay the higher rate, just so you can fill an extra 15 seats. You want a lower rate on JUST those 15 seats.
Keep in mind, this is just one scenario, one very small factor in the complicated mess that makes up the business side of airline travel. You schedule flights not only on the expectation that you'll fill seats, but also so that you'll have planes where you need them when you need them, so pilots don't fly too many hours in a row, get enough sleep, and have as few nights out of town as possible. All of that considered, ticket prices are going to be variable and nonsensical.
-Restil
Re:Maybe this is not so unreasonable (Score:1, Informative)
These third party websites aren't going through an established booking system, instead they are screen scraping and acting as a front-end to the airline's website. This would be like a third party mirroring Slashdot's stories without Slashdot's advertisements, costing Slashdot revenue.
Not quite. It would be more analogous to the third party website proxying requests to the vendor's website, such that every request made to the scraper's website results in a corresponding request to the vendor's website.
That wouldn't be so bad, but these scrapers are usually very poorly implemented, placing obscene amounts of load onto the vendor's website. Constantly hitting the website in a loop to refresh stock counts, etc, while only occasionally sending a sale through to the vendor. The cost to the vendor to service these requests can exceed any profit from the occasional sale made through the scraper.
The two worst flights of my life (Score:5, Informative)
The return flight was almost as bad. The flight was overloaded due to an earlier flight being cancelled, and the replacement plane was a series-100 737 with the old turbojet engines and not the modern -600 series with the CFM engines. The plane was filled to capacity and because it was mostly skiers returning from a winter break, the luggage hold was full of skis and heavy clothing and so on. Basically I'm pretty sure that the plane was at or over MTW as it took an age to get off the runway, and then had to circle the airport for about 45 minutes to gain enough height to get over the Alps. I kept looking out of the window and just not seeing the ground getting any further away - we seemed to be at about 2000ft for ages, so given the previous landing experience I really felt quite nervous for the first time ever when flying. I'd recently qualified for my PPL so I had some knowledge of what was going on - maybe too much for comfort. The landing was bad also, with a manual approach flown by an apparently rookie pilot - the throttle was up, down, up, down, up, down and constantly jinking left and right and pitching up and down - obviously having trouble maintaining the ILS. In the end gave up and did a go-around which added another half an hour due to the very poor climb performance. The second approach was smooth as - must have decided to switch on the autopilot. Even when a go-around and/or a manual approach are standard OP, passengers do get nervous because it doesn't "feel normal". And anxiety is contagious, so once again after landing there was an obvious sense of relief. Since then I have avoided flying with RyanAir - any airline that packs them in that tight and then treats a fare-paying flight as a training exercise for its junior pilots isn't really treating the customer with respect.
Re:Well, if that's the way they want it (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well, if that's the way they want it (Score:5, Informative)
Services like expedia.ca make it easy to search many airlines from one form.
Interestingly, I just used Expedia to do precisely that a couple days ago.
The odd thing about it, though, was that once I selected the flights that I wanted, I was able to go directly to the airline's website (Air Canada, in this case) and buy the tickets for cheaper than Expedia was offering.
So, yes, services like that make it easy to search many airlines from one form, but it's certainly in your interest to check the airline's website as well to make sure you're getting the best price.
Re:The -n business model (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but that was last year. This year profits are down by a monumental 85%, despite ridership having increased by 19%.
Re:Maybe this is not so unreasonable (Score:3, Informative)
Around 90% of the requests hitting the website of a travel company I recently worked for were from scrapers/spiders.
The profit generated from these was less than the cost of serving those requests.
We basically tiered them by profit margin, made deals to provide the ones that made us money with a better service (more timely information for them, less load on our website for us) and tried to block the rest.
You'd be surprised how tricky this can be.
(You'd also be surpirsed how tricky getting price comparison websites to accept a direct API rather than screenscraping can be.)
When you're having to boost the capacity of your web infrastructure by an order of magnitude to cope with the scrapers that's a significant cost, especially in the travel industry - margins of 2-6% are the norm, and that doesn't leave a lot of cash for hardware.
Re:Private jets and old biz models. (Score:3, Informative)
When you think about it: 1 hour to the airport, 2 hours security, 1 hour flight time to anywhere (assuming they're actually on time), and then another hour to where you want to be.
Now if this is true for you (especially the 2 hours security), you must really live in a fucked up country. I recently took a flight from Weeze (Germany) to Wroclaw (Poland). It took me a 50 minute drive to the airport. I was there one hour before depature to be sure, but in fact 30 minutes would have done easily. Security checkings took 1 minute (30 seconds for a agent to check if my self-printed boarding pass matches with my identity card, another 30 seconds to get my backpack through the x-ray and myself through the metal-detector). The flight was 1 hour and 20 minutes and at Wroclaw a 30 minute drive (by bus) into the town. Total time: 3 hours 40 minutes, and cut be cut to 3 hours 10 minutes.
I think you are betraying yourself by making airline travel look worse to justify your decision to drive with the car. Granted driving by car has the advantages you listed, but you neglect the downsides is has, as: Beeing forced to stay sharp and concentrate on the traffic for hours, beeing force to sit for hours (breaks increase the total travel time), beeing forced to stop if you need to go to the toilet, drinking (non-alcoholic) and eating while driving is possible but dangerous, you can't read/work/sleep while driving etc...
Re:Well, if that's the way they want it (Score:2, Informative)
I suspect Ryanair is mostly upset about the screen with markup. If all the sites did was search for the cheapest airfare and forward you then there would be nothing whatsoever Ryanair could do about it.
http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/news.php?yr=08&month=aug&story=reg-en-050808 [ryanair.com]
From their news post:
"Ryanair has a policy of preventing screenscrapers unlawfully accessing Ryanairâ(TM)s website, because in many cases these screenscrapers are engaged in some or all of the following unlawful/inappropriate behaviour:
1. They are in breach of Ryanair's copyright rules.
2. They are in breach of Ryanair.com's terms of use.
3. They are levying unjustified and unnecessary handling charges (in some cases up to double the Ryanair fare) on Ryanair passengers.
4. They don't provide passengers with Ryanair's accurate terms/conditions.
5. They don't provide passengers with up to date flight or change information.
6. They are delaying ordinary passengers' access to the Ryanair.com website."
Re:Well, if that's the way they want it (Score:3, Informative)
I'll second that. I took the train from Connecticut to New Mexico once, and it was wonderful. The three days on the train were actually great, because there was no pressure to do touristy things, just enjoy the view, read a book, talk, and in general rest. Then once in New Mexico the rush was on to see this, go there, etc etc, but the trip home was again restful and most pleasant. Get a sleeper for long trips; it's well worth it.
Re:One way or the other, it's asking for trouble (Score:5, Informative)
You want to fly from Boston to Salt Lake City. A well known airline offers that flight for 899$. If you would have booked BOS > LAX then the offer would have been 399$ for all the way to Los Angeles. This is despite the fact that well known airline uses SLC as one of its major hubs and you actually have to switch planes in SLC.
What did the savvy traveler do? Why of course he got out in SLC and dumped the remaining coupon to LAX.
Another famous strategy was nested booking, which used the Saturday night stayover rule (flights where your return segment is on a Sunday or later are a lot cheaper, this is to gouge the business traveler). It works like this:
Wednesday JFK > MSP and Friday MSP > JFK : 1299$
Wednesday JFK > MSP, Monday MSP > JFK : 299$
So what you do is you buy two return tickets, like:
Wednesday JFK > MSP, Monday MSP > JFK : 299 and Friday MSP > JFK (with a return whenever the next week) : 249 $.
And ergo: You saved a lot of money.
I'm not sure if this still works nowadays, since the airlines naturally hate it and put all sorts of fine print into the T&C to prohibit that.
Airline pricing and yield management. A fascinating subject that never ceases to amaze.
Re:Well, if that's the way they want it (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is this: When expedia et al first entered the market, there was a basic airline ticket offering. It was economy class, it let you check a bag, gave you some frequent flyer miles and might have given you a meal.
Today, many of those offerings are a la carte offerings, presented in the airline's site, at time of ticket purchase. It's difficult for expedia to present all those options, so they usually present a baseline ticket price that includes 'most of what customers likely expect.' However, if you're willing to go absolutely bare-bones you can probably get a cheaper ticket at Air Canada's site. I bet if you compared apples to apples with identical options on the tickets, you'd find the prices the same.