Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradvl | Hacker News Reader

The reason that Ryanair is against OTAs reselling flights is not the fees, it’s that they’re often resold as a package holiday.

Package holidays are flights bundled with hotels etc and are usually sold at much higher margin.

Ryanair has its own package holiday business and prefers that they make the margin, not someone else.

There are many more package holiday companies than airlines, they want to use this ruling and the fact that they also own an airline to restrict competition and make more money.

View on HN

A big part is fees. OTAs like Booking sell the base part of flight from Ryanair and low cost airlines at the same price as the airlines but with much higher fees for luggage and extras. They hide this second part from flight search engines, so they appear cheaper when including luggage.

I'm sure that a lot of dislike from low cost airlines comes from shitty OTAs rather than the airlines themselves.

Boosting this.

I recently tried to use Expedia to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto on Porter Airlines because then I could use my TD Reward points.

The default prices that showed up in the results looked the same on Expedia or directly on Porter, so it didn't seem like I was losing anything.

Except that base flight included no carry-on and no checked-baggage, which I needed to do. On Porter directly fixing that cost an extra $40. Expedia said it cost $60.

For this particular flight I also needed to be able to make changes after booking. On Porter that increased the cost by $100. On Expedia, $150.

I still did it, cuz, y'know - points. But I shook my fist at Expedia the entire time.

It can go both ways.

Pros of Expedia:

    - they have my card
    - their website does not suck as much as the airline’s
    - they let me cancel within 24/48 hours for free and immediately

The second point can be a huge selling point and it applies to a lot of OTAs. Every time I try to book direct “because it’s best” I easily spend triple the time and sometimes I get fleeced anyway (oh, here’s a $5 convenience fee for using a credit card we don’t like)

    > Every time I try to book direct “because it’s best” I easily spend triple the time

I have a similar experience. As a result, I have not booked a flight directly on the carrier's website in years. Do only suckers use the carrier's website now, because the prices and/or service are always worse? Sigh.

I still try to book direct because I (uh) enjoy opening 10 sites/apps at once and comparing the prices and getting the last dollar, but yeah if you value time more than money, booking direct is not a great idea.

Not that this would help now, but you might have been able to book through Expedia and then later add the luggage through the airline directly. Still can't use points on it but maybe you could have saved the points for another vacation some other time.

So, basically, Ryanair is against free market. They want to have monopoly, to raise prices. Good for Ryanair, bad for consumers.

This is like standard business methodology these days. Nearly every company prefers this. Just ask any olympian how hard it is to even get to the olympics let alone win.

Business would much rather be proprietary and not have to work that hard.

Booking is just acting as a middleman. Booking flights are still being booked through Ryanair, which was part of the suit.

>Ryanair is against free market. They want to have monopoly, to raise prices.

This is the goal of almost every business and that isn't against the free market it is the free market and the precise reason we have regulators to ensure competition.

Booking.com isn't the market force keeping Ryanair's prices down.

Ryanair wants to make it harder for consumer to compare prices.

And Ryanair wants to upsell you during the buying process, which they can't do as well, if you don't buy on their site.

This is the reason.

Nothing is stopping airlines from offering 1-click bookings, except that lengthy funnels bring in tons of cash. Ryanair has been a master at this since the beginning of time.

In 2020 I booked a flight directly on Google Flights and the booking was complete before I even realized, it was so simple. I never found that UI again.

    > I booked a flight directly on Google Flights

Does anyone else have the experience where 25-50% of the click-here-to-buy from Google Flights just don't work? Is it bait-and-switch from the carrier?

The underlying systems are old, slow and have multiple layers of caching, plus it’s a huge search space, so you’re never really seeing real-time availability. It’s just the nature of it that a lot of the times the tickets are already gone, though Google used to be one of the most reliable.

It has happened for me many times, so could have some truth here

Or selling insurance, renting a car, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com