Up to 1,000 Ryanair passengers a day could be without flights as a result of an aggressive new policy at the airline to combat intermediary websites offering bookings.
The low cost airline is to start cancelling bookings which have been made on so called ‘screen scrapers’ from Monday.
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said that about 1,000 bookings are made with Ryanair via these websites each day.
‘We are free to cancel a booking,’ he said a press conference in London. ‘We want to cause as much chaos for the screen scrapers as possible’.
Screen scraping can occur on websites which compare costs from different airlines. Such websites can also be used to book flights.
When asked what would happen to people who have booked on these sites, Mr O'Leary said: ‘They won't be flying’.
He claimed that passengers are ‘getting stiffed’ on these sites, which he says usually charge more than fares quoted on his airline's website.
Ryanair will refund the cost of the flight to the intermediary website.
In such bookings, Mr O’Leary said, Ryanair does not deal directly with passengers, nor does it have e-mail addresses for them.
Passing the refund on - and refunding the cost which the intermediary site charged - will be left up to that site.
The CEO also said that there will be ‘further job losses in winter’ mainly as a result installing check-in kiosks in Dublin and Stansted.
These losses will affect check-in staff and baggage handlers’.
‘There will be a decline in jobs involved in airport handling,’ Mr O’Leary said.
Asked about the scale of the job losses, Mr O'Leary would say only that the numbers will be ‘relatively small’ with growth in employment at the airline predicted overall.
