I imagine this is limited to a scenario where you: 1. Act as a middle-man for the transaction (as this lawsuit was about resale), 2. Interfere with pricing or other service aspects, 3. Add your own profit. I don't think this sets any precedent against scraping on its own.
(The highly variable and discriminatory pricing of travel would also best be addressed in regulation, rather than relying entirely on third-party resellers to rescue you.)
The implied conclusion that regulation makes things expensive is wrong, and comparing the air travel market over half a century ago with the market today, and crediting a change made in 1978 for the difference doesn’t make sense.
EU air travel is quite regulated with e.g. consumer rights for cash compensation, hotel and food service in case of delay, and yet air travel reached a point some years before covid where some providers played with the thought of having tickets be free - the main source of income for the airlines was in duty-free on either end of the journey anyway, so more travelers meant more revenue even if their tickets were zero.
Disallowing discriminatory and unfair business practices is not the same as having the government set travel prices.
I'm not sure this is the gotcha you think it is. Air travel, even in coach, was downright luxury compared to where it is today, and I'm not even talking about in the distant past, I'm talking about 25 or so years ago. Seats are narrower, legroom is practically nonexistent, and the seats only recline like two inches these days. Also almost everything is a la carte.
Apparently this part of the biz is taking a bit of a nosedive, and he expects airline prices to skyrocket to compensate for the loss in revenue.
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.
For me as someone looking to book a flight, bookingcom acts as a user agent in my service so why should Ryanair have any legal basis on preventing bookingcom from doing so?!
Side note: Where is a service where I can just enter from/to which city/airport I want to fly (or in Europe also rail), what luggage and passengers I carry, and it spits me out the cheapest price offered for the route and sells me the ticket(s) without having to create individual accounts, spread payment info around and try to fight myself through a shitton of dark patterns, broken English and constantly changing UIs? I know this shit is possible, travel agents live and breathe for that stuff, but I'd like to do that myself instead of getting upselled by the travel agent. Rail and flight should be dumb pipes.
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.
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 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.
How difficult would it be to destroy Booking.com's entire businessmodel or at least their grip on the market?
Do they have a significant grip on the market? I’ve never used them, but for all I know they sell a majority of plane tickets.
Then again I haven’t used Ryanair either. The reputations of Ryanair, Spirit etc are sufficient for me to avoid them. But in booking.com’s case I barely even know it exists.
[1] https://calawyers.org/privacy-law/ninth-circuit-holds-data-s...
The short answer is... uh, not much. The order on the motion to dismiss suggests that to violate the CFAA, there is a requirement that you're specifically bypassing some form of access control, and it says the complaint sufficiently alleges such control (specifically password-protects internet accounts). Which... is a somewhat weak argument, but the judge here seems to think that HiQ is narrowly focused on "what's publicly available without requiring users to authenticate themselves." The motion for summary judgement states:
> Booking and Kayak admit that their access was intentional, and there are no factual disputes that Booking’s and Kayak’s access circumvents authentication mechanisms implemented by Ryanair specifically to keep Defendants out.
which, again, is vague on what those authentication mechanisms were, and it's not like this article provides any elucidation.
It's far from certain that this will be overturned on appeal, but "creating an account to use for screen scraping" doesn't sound like something that CFAA prohibits.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.731...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.731...
> Part E: Computer Fraud an Abuse Act Loss
> Did Ryanair prove by a preponderance of evidence that it suffered actual economic harm caused by Booking.com violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and, if yes, state the amount.
> X Yes _ No
> $ 5000
> Part E Nominal Damages
> $ 0
> Part F: Punitive Damages
> $0
I know Rynair won the lawsuit but uh, having to pay only 5k sounds like a win for Booking.com
I would imagine that it is also a nice foundation for cases against AI training data scraped from sites.
1. Jury verdict is "NO" to CFAA violations.
2. Jury verdict is "YES" to CFAA violations and the jury award $0.
Is option (2) worse for Ryanair because it more negatively impacts any appeals process that they may have otherwise planned?
Does the award of $0 become a precedent which is stronger than option (1) in deterring would-be CFAA litigants of the future?
So, damages of 5k is strictly the lowest amount possible while also answering YES for CFAA.
> too big to effectively cut off
This is also true for the hotel industry, and is part of their moat. Smaller hotels especially can have the bulk of their revenue coming from aggregators, so they can’t drop the platform regardless of how much they like it or not. Building your own marketing channels is hard and expensive.
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.
I'm sure that a lot of dislike from low cost airlines comes from shitty OTAs rather than the airlines themselves.
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.
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.
Business would much rather be proprietary and not have to work that hard.
This is the first opinion on the case from 2021 which denied Booking Holdings Inc request to dismiss:
[1] https://www.ded.uscourts.gov/sites/ded/files/opinions/20-cv-...
Ryanair (Irish company) makes one claim against Delaware corporation Booking Holdings Inc (including subsidiaries Kayak Software Corporation and Priceline LLC as Delaware corporations and Agoda as a Singaporean company) citing 18 USC 1030(a)(2)(C), (a)(4) and (a)(5)(A)-(C)[2]. Amongst reasons to seek dismissal of the case, Booking Holdings Inc name drops Etraveli, Mystifly and Travelfusion as the three companies which were used by Booking Holdings Inc to scrape airline websites including Ryanair's website.
It's hard from just this opinion to figure out what exactly Booking Holdings Inc, Etraveli, Mystifly and/or Travelfusion may have been found to do wrong. It sounds most likely that Ryanair may have successfully argued their public website is a "protected computer" because there is a "By clicking search you agree to the Website Terms of Use" button on their main website search form, and the ToS is the form of "protection". Looking behind the scenes, it's a fairly simple "anonymous token" API request without any secrets being required to ask the API to respond.
Deleting the HTML elements from the DOM that provide the "By clicking search you agree.." and the associated checkbox doesn't prevent the form from being submitted and results returned successfully.
Here in Illinois, at least, they make it up to a felony to violate a web site ToS, and it's specifically worded as such in the statute.
Does Booking.com do something particularly bad compared to something like SkyScanner or Google flights?
> "We expect that this ruling will end the internet piracy and overcharging perpetrated on both airlines and other travel companies and consumers by the unlawful activity of OTA (online travel agent) Pirates," Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary said.
Why is it almost always cheaper to buy through some weird 3rd party than with the airline directly? Sometimes it's a few bucks and I book with the airline directly, but sometimes it's over $50 cheaper to book through some 3rd party I've never heard of.
I never thought I’d find myself arguing Ryanair’s corner, but adding booking.com to the mix likely just makes an already poor experience with Ryanair truly dire.
Also, cannot airline see that requests come from datacenter IPs and not from residential?
It looks like it is super easy to block this on airline side.
Ryanair has successfully sued other companies doing the same for a while now. But I mostly know about their cases in the EU. This case is from USA.
> Why is it almost always cheaper to buy through some weird 3rd party than with the airline directly?
It's not necessarily cheaper, the flight-search is usually just better in filtering, and has a cache of previous results. So humans might get the same cheap result if they just search long enough and know how to use the airline-site efficiently.
> sometimes it's over $50 cheaper
$ tells me you are in the US where these kind of legacy shenanigans happen. Never with Ryanair.
Out of curiosity, I did go and check a bunch of routes that I know Ryanair flies on SkyScanner, and it was cheaper to buy directly from Ryanair. So fair play to them, I'm surprised anyone would buy from a 3rd party when buying direct is cheaper.
Presumably, given they're fine with Google Flights:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67873695
"In a statement, Ryanair described the online agents as "pirates". It said it would "continue to make its fares available to honest/transparent online travel agents such as Google Flights," which it said "do not add hidden mark ups to Ryanair prices and who direct passengers to make their bookings directly on the Ryanair.com website"."
Disingenuous at best. Google Flights is not a Ryanair agent.
What we on hackernews would consider scraping is not covered by this lawsuit, and ryanair's vendetta is not against scraping but "pirate online travel agencies" (resellers).
“A US court ruled that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing part of Ryanair's website without permission, court documents showed, a ruling the airline said would help end unauthorised screen scraping by booking sites.”
But I guess my scraping is a lot less, as I'm only looking for a few flights
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPCO
However, interpreting this data properly is decidedly nontrivial (>1M LoC).
Pricing does not imply booking is OK, though. And even circa 1999, Southwest hassled us (ITA Software) about even showing their fares, without us offering any way to book any flights on any carrier.
Booking.com brands themself as European, during the DMA debattes and complained they have a disadvantage to American competitors.
> "We expect that this ruling will end the internet piracy and overcharging perpetrated on both airlines and other travel companies and consumers by the unlawful activity of OTA (online travel agent) Pirates," Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary said.
I thought piracy was distributing unauthorized copies of things like music and videos. Wouldn't booking.com's actions be closer to unauthorized ticket brokering?
I guess if you want to demonize someone for doing something you don't like it sounds worse to be labeled a "pirate" than an "unauthorized broker."
Issue was that Kiwi pocketed refounds, would not inform customers of flight changes, changing baggage was very hard...
Ryanair service is OK (if you take it as a bus company). There do no play dead as Airbnb support. During covid they provided refunds sooner than Lufthanza for example.
Of course, now with AI that's a different story, but barring AI scraping a page for data should not be illegal just because the company wants to sell you API access.
It seems the bigger issue at hand may be booking.com purchasing the tickets and adding a lot of hidden fees on top.
What gets me is why on Earth any provider would allow this - dealing direct is so much more sane 99% of the time, and a package holiday provider already has a reseller agreement.
Just stomp booking.com into the ground - I simply don’t understand why hotels and airlines don’t do it?
Classic prisoners dillema. The problem is all the hotels, etc. need to be on the same page.
It’s everything that was before Google captured all the advertising revenue there ever was. And reduced it to a list on a black ink on white page
Airlines are in a race to the bottom because there are only 8 bits in the 1970s booking system so there is only a competition on seat price. Chnage that to be able to have different parameters and we compete on other factors
If hotels are just competing for price on booking.com then they are heading to the same trap - beautiful architecture, fantastic location, smiling staff, 1950s movie stars making films in the courtyard- none of it matters if it’s price per room in NYC.
The only way cows stop being treated like cattle is to make sure every human sees them as individuals - it’s a lot of work. But the struggle is worth the abbatoir.
My assumption is that the issue was not about automation/scraping, but rather, the way in which booking.com engaged in scraping amounted to some kind of fraud.
That is of course until you add all the additional charges.
If you bypass that process they don't make their profit.
AFAIK, it's impossible to resell flight tickets in EU, they are attached to real names that are checked upon boarding time. If wonder how did Booking manage to resell Ryanair tickets at scale?
[the airline, Europe's largest by passenger numbers, has in recent years launched a series of legal actions against third-party booking platforms that resell its tickets without permission.
It says the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.]
(It's _possible_ that this is a recent DMA/DSA compliance thing, I suppose.)
If you search on google you are also agreeing to their terms, there just isn’t a checkbox.
Ryanair doesn't pay a commission to booking sites, and their pricing model is to advertise $15 flights but making booking an obstacle course so plenty of passengers find themselves paying $60 instead.
They therefore don't provide an API for the booking sites to use.
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