Hacker News Reader

> Where was the "defraud" happening here? When Ryanair wants to make money on flights they shouldn't offer flight tickets that only make money when they can lure the consumer to purchase addons via a boatload of dark patterns.

This lawsuit is not about ryanair's pricing model, so that the company engages in bad practices is irrelevant to the court decision. What matters is that booking.com wants to earn money on selling ryanair tickets while evading using reseller agreements by using the site as if they were a private customer (likely also against the terms of service), with supposedly some bad side-effects like ryanair being unable to communicate with the customer (which could be bad if they wanted to e.g. give you a notice about the flight during the sales process).

You will have to sue ryanair specifically about their pricing to get a decision on that, which of course first requires ensuring that it is unlawful or unfair business conduct within your jurisdiction (which it might not be).

> bookingcom acts as a user agent in my service so why should Ryanair have any legal basis on preventing bookingcom from doing so?!

They are not your useragent, they are acting as a reseller: You buy a product from them which they acquire elsewhere, taking a profit in the process.

If they were in fact entirely transparent in the process, merely allowing you to purchase the product at the best available price directly (e.g., a plugin to find deals/discounts, VPN to get it from the cheapest region, etc.), then the case would have been hard or impossible for ryanair to make.

I think parents point is:

It’s only because of Ryan Airs business model of upselling via dark patterns that they care.

And because of these dark patterns, parent as a consumer is willing to pay someone else to go through the booking process and avoid the dark pattern on their behalf.

And the point is good: if company A is annoying to interact with, why can’t you pay company B to do it for you?

Isn't the issue that you can do that, but Company A can also add in a clause that you can only do business with us (or with this specific product/website/etc. we offer) if you agree to be buying the tickets for yourself and not for someone else. In which case, if Company B says they are, they are lying.

I think one interesting question from this is what happens when you put an AI in there instead. If Company B sells an AI that Person can use to interact with Company A, at what point does it count as Person's interaction and at what point does it count as Company A's interaction.

Obviously Person is allowed to use technology to interact on behalf of them. They are using Chrome, or IE, or Firefox, etc. This doesn't count as Google/Microsoft/Mozilla interacting with Company A. So on a continuum (likely multi dimensional) from internet browsers to what Booking.com did in this case, including AI somewhere in the continuum space, where is the legal limit?

> They are not your useragent, they are acting as a reseller: You buy a product from them which they acquire elsewhere, taking a profit in the process.

Yeah so what? Why should anyone, be it a private person or a commercial entity, be restricted from buying something and then re-selling it to another person or entity?

The only thing I'm willing to accept as a restriction for any kind of legal transaction is a reasonable price cap (i.e. no sale above face value of tickets + 5% fees) to get scalpers under control and for security reasons (e.g. name-bound tickets for sports events to prevent hooligans from attending or flight tickets to prevent terrorists from boarding).

But neither applies in this case - flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity that attracts scalpers and the airline has the full set of PNR data.

flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity that attracts scalpers

If airline ticket resale was as easy as concert tickets, you'd probably see a predatory scalping market develop. Airplane tickets are scarce in that there is limited ability to adjust supply, especially in the short term. If flights to a destination are booked, you can't just throw another plane on the route because the gates are limited and inflexible.

> If airline ticket resale was as easy as concert tickets, you'd probably see a predatory scalping market develop.

I don't think so, because a predatory scalping market only happens when artists are pricing their tickets below the market rate.

Airlines have so such compunction, so they'd just raise their prices until scalpers no longer had a margin opportunity. Or, to put in another way, airline pricing is already as "predatory" as the most aggressive scalping markets.

> Why should anyone ... be restricted from buying something and then re-selling it to another person

because:

> flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity

Airline tickets are not a commodity, full stop. They form a contract for a service between the airline and the customer. They're not a bag of fucking apples. Travel agents, when arranging air fares, are agents in the legal sense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency) and not resellers. Booking.com were screwed on that front because they were deceptive in the particulars, a failure of good faith dealing that undermines the claim of agency.

> Airline tickets are not a commodity, full stop.

Why are they not? It's not like there are any airlines beyond oil sheikh owned ones that actually deliver customer service. The only reasonable choice a customer may have is to choose between operators that fly Boeing deathtraps or not.

The commodity is getting transported from A to B, getting treated like shit including getting groped by TSA or its equivalent, and not getting replacement for a bag that's marked as "lost" when it's actually clearly trackable with an AirTag to some bowels of any in-between airport.

Setting aside the parts of this question that sound like bitter personal experiences, the simple answer is that commodities are traded on commodity markets. If one doesn’t exist, it’s because no-one has figured out how. In this case it’ll be because bookings aren’t fungible and the services not identical.

> Where is a service where I can just enter from/to which city/airport I want to fly (or in Europe also rail)

Try momondo.com. You can add # of luggage (checked in & cabin) and play with some other parameters. They won't, or very rarely will, show train connections. They sometimes show bus connections, though.

For train travel I find trainline.com quite good. It gives you an overview over what's available an with which carriers. They are UK focused but offer tickets throughout Europe.

The Man in Seat 61 is (https://www.seat61.com/) is an invaluable resource to inform yourself about train travel. Mostly focused on Europe but covering the world.

Hope this helps.

Edited to add : I use Momondo as an information resource about available carriers and pricing for specific routes. I would never book via an OTA, but strcitly with the airline executing the flight. No matter if it's a few franks more.

If there's any problem with your flight you're up shit creek if you have to deal via a third party.

I much prefer to book directly for air and hotels. If something goes wrong, there's one less level of indirection.

On the flip side if something goes wrong you get to discover what $RANDOM_VENDOR in $RANDOM_COUNTRY thinks is a reasonable policy for handling it, which is not usually a big risk for domestic USA travel, but for international travel can be a true wrench in the spokes.

Maybe but if $RANDOM_VENDOR isn't willing/able to help, I don't really expect Expedia to. That said, I do use an agent to arrange self-guided walking trips and things like that and they seem to be a useful resource rather than planning and booking the whole thing myself, in part, because a lot of local knowledge can be involved. But that's different from booking 5 nights in some European city.

I had a couple of times when car rentals and hotels decided to add surprise charges when I arrived. As those was booked through Expedia, the latter refunded me those immediately (and I suspect went and got them back from the vendor later)

>If there's any problem with your flight you're up shit creek if you have to deal via a third party.

I have learned that the hard way. My flight was cancelled and I don't get any notification. There is a real communication issue between OTAs and airlines. After a week of poking the customer service, I got a refund from Opodo, fortunately.

Fun fact: momondo.com is part of Kayak, which is owned by Booking.

Airline websites stick a giant middle finger up at the traditional ecommerce mantra that every extra second costs you N% of sales.

I had to load the desktop version of vueling.com the other day just to have the UI understand that I didn't want to purchase a return flight.

Vueling doesn't even comply with GDPR on their marketing sign up. It's a singularly terrible experience.

There is no general legal right for one entity to interpose itself between another entity and its customers. The concept of a User Agent is not a legal concept, it is merely a technical term. If RyanAir doesn't want you to interact with its site through Firefox, they have a legal right to do so. They doubly so have the right to ban Booking.com from buying tickets on your behalf, and then selling them to you for more money.

Just for rail, I quite like trainline.com. It tries to hide the madness that is very poor national/private rail service and their ticketing regimes, but really there’s only so much you can do, so often I get two or more tickets for legs of travel, some of which change as I remain on the same train?!?

I use Railboard, exactly like trainline but without the booking fee as it's made by national rail

Thanks for that! Unfortunately UK only? Do you know of similar no-fee apps for pan-European travel?

Just a quick follow up, I haven’t been able to find Railboard pricing in the UK that is more than 1p cheaper than Trainline, so I’ll probably stick with the latter, which also offers pan-European ticketing, which is fairly important to me.

To answer side question: try skiplagged.com

rome2rio.com comes closest to that experience compared to the other services (not affiliated)