It was announced yesterday that a judge in Spain has granted an injunction against Ryanair preventing them from canceling flights sold by screenscrapers.
Ryanair recently introduced a policy of canceling flights not bought directly from their website in an attempt to stop misrepresentation by third parties posing as intermediaries.
The injunction was requested by Spanish online travel agency Rumbo, who routinely scrape the websites of easyJet, Ryanair and other low cost airlines for prices and take payment directly from customers -including a dubiously legal processing fee– pretending to be authorised resellers.
These airlines operate an exclusive direct-sales model which relies on their ability to interact directly with a customer to keep prices competitive in exchange for an opportunity to offer cross-sales of their ancillary ranges. A third party automated system scraping their websites and lifting their prices removes the opportunity for direct customer interaction and as a result airlines sites’ terms and conditions clearly specify that they must not be used by automated tools to scrape prices or make bookings on behalf of third parties.
Customers are put at risk as well: the integrity of their personal information cannot be guaranteed by either party (airline or intermediary). In the event of a change or cancellation customers are left in the cold as the airline’s systems have no record of the customer having made the transaction and can’t therefore contact them, release information relating to a booking or take action on their instructions as required by the data protection legislation. Those systems have records of the pirate agency having made a booking, not the final customer, therefore it falls back to the agency to manage any further communication. Unsurprisingly, they often fail to do so, or charge ransom (what they call processing fees) for it.
What angers me most about this case is what it says about Spain and its prospects in the new world of eBusiness: clearly, the injunction has been granted out of misguided patriotism. Surely the judge must not have spent any time at all researching the particulars of this case. Should he/she had done it, they’d realize that Rumbo are indeed illegally accessing the computer systems of the airlines and imposed a heavy fine and an order to immediately cease. Computer crime is as heavily punished in Spain as it is in the UK. But not, it seems, when the culprit is a Spanish David hanging as a leech off a foreign Goliath. I guess those cases are not really crimes, they’re opportunities, are they, Mr Judge?
The problem may seem inconsequential. What’s wrong with a bit of harmless home support? Putting the future of the whole country at risk, that’s what. Online is the marketplace of the present, and markets need rules -few, fair and consistently enforced rules. Rules create a level playing field and affect all market players in the same way, creating an environment where investors can take calculated risks and reap rewards. At a single stroke, this decision has created an enormous regulatory vacuum in Spain’s online market. As a result, it is impossible now to protect systems, intellectual property, brand or product from little opportunists. Risks cannot be calculated and investment should dry up. This little inconsequential injunction has thrown Spain’s eBusiness prospects back into the lawless wild west.
Cowboys rejoice, everyone else be very afraid.
Well, I do agree that the “scavengers” must be breaking the rules that Ryanair is setting, but this rules need to obey to the local laws. Without knowing the legal fundamentals that the judge has used in this case, I can say that as a rule of thumb in Spin consumer’s legislation any clause that seems to be “ABUSIVE” to the consumer, is consider void. So it is up to the judge to decide how abusive is the clause that the scavengers are using to hide behind.
Lack of experience and inadequate legislation may be more probable cause than bad faith from the judge……
My two cents (euro)
good one
good one
Agustin, I’m afraid the rules are clear and the local laws clearly support Ryanair’s case here – just look at Apple’s iPhone and their exclusive distribution deal with Movistar. You don’t see judges striking that down and allowing any operator to sell the phones, do you? The case is the same, however the interpretation of the judge is very different. Whether because of misguided protectionism or pure ignorance, the impact is the same: lawlessness, underinvestment, failure.
Spain almost made it to the first division of developed countries. Decisions like this are quickly pulling it back towards the second rank of the developed world – a place it seems predestined to share with the likes of Italy. In an Internet-enabled, infinitely scalable world where the winner takes all and the second takes nothing, it is the worse that could happen to it.
Now everyone is talking about the American economy and eclections, nice to read something different. Eugene
RyanAir and others need to protect themselves technologically.
In essence this is no different than a travel agent who picks up the phone on behalf of a client.
I do not think that Ryan Air or any air company can legally force a relationship with “the customer”. Any person can designate an agent to do their purchasing.
What RyanAir can do however is to put a great big terms of service clause on their website that states plainly that anyone who USES their site agrees NOT to copy and resuse their data for commercial purposes thus making the users who opt in part of a contract. The only way to access actual pricing SHOULD be after such a TOS agreement is digitally signed in some way.
That’s part one.
Part two is that Ryan Air and others need to figure out ways to combat the bots that are accessing their website and disable that access. It’s obvious that the bots would have to hit the site thousands of times a day in order to keep getting the latest prices. So it seems that Ryan Air could figure out a way to limit or distort that access making the site unusable for the scrapers.
At no time should the actual consumer be penalized as the consumer has zero idea whether the seller of the tickets are authorized by the airline to act as an agent on their behalf or not. That’s what the effect of canceling tickets sold by the quasi-agents does. The consumer only wants to get from point A to point B and cannot be held responsible for figuring out the business relationships between online sellers of such tickets.
RyanAir however should – and probably does – warn consumers that any ticket purchased through anyone but them MIGHT be fraudulent or counterfeit. Any consumer who is worth their salt should double check airline websites BEFORE committing to a ticket unless they are certain of the vendor, like Expedia for example.
As an English person living in Spain, having got fed up recently with broken and multicultural England, I am astonished how Spain is able to get away with their protectionism.
For example trying to register an older vehicle from Germany is 1,500€ & 1 months effort in Spain, but £75 over the Internet for the UK!
With today’s loss of many 1000’s of English Jobs from the last ‘Train Builders’ in the country, as EU rules force the UK Government to choose a German company for it’s tender. It appears that soft Britain is really getting shafted to a ridiculous level, on every front.
Every rule, from criminal to rights and the EU, appears to be damaging if from within and outside. Meaning either the UK’s costly law makers are crap or they are corrupt and benefiting from it’s weaknesses.
Either way, it’s past saving as it’s past make-up and strength will never return.