Ryanair takes legal action against Budget Travel for screen-scraping

Ryanair has launched a legal attack on Dublin-based Budget Travel for breaching the airline’s website terms of use and intellectual property rights.

The low-cost airline has asked the court to prevent Budget Travel from ‘unauthorised screen-scraping and reselling of Ryanair seats at inflated prices to consumers’.

In a statement Ryanair says the travel agency has rejected its request to stop selling its flights and the airline goes on to list its claims against Budget Travel including flights being sold at a mark-up.

Budget Travel declined to comment but a number of flight searches made on its website for routes served by Ryanair did not yield any results for the Irish carrier.

The airline says it only allows price comparison sites to list prices in return for a charitable donation of €100 annually.

In November, eDreams and Bravofly recommenced offering Ryanair flights despite reCaptcha technology implemented by the airline in November which aimed to stop screen-scraping.

The current action is the latest in a string of legal attempts by Ryanair to prevent websites scraping its fares including its win in German courts in 2005.

Related posts:

  1. Ryanair screen scraping issue turns into a daily farce
  2. Ryanair captcha move disruptive but not impossible
  3. Ryanair can take comfort as big brains crack Captcha but not reCaptcha
Linda Fox About Linda Fox

Linda Fox is a reporter for Tnooz. For the past six years she has worked as a freelance journalist across a range of B2B titles including Travolution, ABTA Magazine, Travelmole and the Business Travel Magazine.

In this time she has also undertaken corporate projects for a number of high profile travel technology, travel management and research companies.

Prior to her freelance career she covered hotels and technology news for Travel Trade Gazette for seven years. Linda joined TTG from Caterer & Hotelkeeper where she worked on the features desk for more than five years.

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