Ryanair : EDREAMS ACCEPTS COURT ORDER PREVENTING MISUSE OF RYANAIR’S TRAVEL AGENT BOOKING SYSTEM

Ryanair today (Wed, 4 Mar) welcomed the Irish High Court's order recording binding undertakings given by eDreams, which require the Spanish OTA to cease all direct and indirect access to Ryanair's "Travel Agent Direct" (TAD) booking systems and to take immediate steps to prevent and stop any contractor from doing so.

Under the High Court Order, eDreams has agreed it will stop accessing Ryanair's TAD booking system, stop using third parties to access it on its behalf, and take immediate steps to shut down any activity if it occurs. This follows Ryanair's action last week to block eDreams' latest attempt to sell Ryanair flights by conspiring with third parties to unlawfully access Ryanair fares and mis-sell them by breaching it's TAD system

These developments come against a backdrop of repeated findings by European Courts and Regulators that eDreams engages in "misleading", "deceptive" and "manipulative" commercial practices. The Hamburg Regional Court recently confirmed that eDreams' price displays are "misleading", that its advertised Prime "savings" could not be achieved, and that eDreams had breached existing court orders, resulting in further fines. In Italy, the AGCM has fined eDreams €9m, ruling that its Prime scheme is "misleading" and "manipulative", with consumers "in almost all cases" shown higher Prime prices than non-subscribers and subjected to discriminatory "discounts". Internal eDreams documents advocated using "reverse psychology" to drive subscriptions.

While transparent OTAs such as Booking.com, Lastminute and Kiwi have already adopted Ryanair's price-transparency standards, eDreams continues to refuse, because such standards would prevent it from "misleading" consumers. Ryanair has repeatedly offered eDreams free, direct API access to its fares if it adopts the same transparency standards as all approved Ryanair OTA partners - an offer eDreams continues to ignore.

Ryanair's CMO, Dara Brady, said:

"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.

Our priority remains, ensuring passengers benefit from Ryanair's industry-leading transparency standards, as delivered by our approved OTA partners, and that they receive the full, direct service they are entitled to when booking Ryanair flights."