Comment by notahacker
1 day ago
Ryanair (and to an extent other LCCs) generally doesn't like ticket sales through resellers because a substantial part of its profit margin comes from upsell of add-ons and partner services during the booking/reservation process
Customer support would be a nightmare - who's responsible? Communication? Refunds? Scams? Dodgy middle men?
RyanAir would get all the negatives from an unhappy customer and restricted ways to fix it.
Any issues at all and it wouldn't take much to make a sale unprofitable.
Thanks, that makes sense.
Why isn't Ryanair allowed to prohibit use of their website by resellers?
> Why isn't Ryanair allowed to prohibit use of their website by resellers?
To give a more general answer than the sibling comment, setting conditions on how a product may be used usually distorts the market, harms buyers, and reduces competition, naturally to the benefit of the one setting the conditions.
For example selling cars that you're not allowed to use for "professional" use, only personal (as Nvidia does with forbidding datacenter use of some of its GPUs, charging extra for it). There was also a self-driving company that forbade buyers from using their cars to create a taxi service, essentially reserving that market for themselves. It may have been Tesla, but I can't find the story right now. In general living in a world where we need manufacturer's permission to do anything is less than ideal.
In this case I'm sure Ryanair would like to spin it as resellers upcharging customers, but by complete coincidence, their practices also prevent someone knowledgeable in all their dark patterns from protecting customers from them by acting as an intermediary.
I guess because travel agencies need to be able to show customers the most economical flights? By prohibiting agencies on their website, they can not give consumers (through their agents) the ability to compare different choices.
It's a restraint of trade issue. You're not allowed to restrain other's people's ability to run a business or earn an income, beyond some reasonable cases.
Like running the only gas station in town and then refusing to sell fuel to a competitor who is trying to build a gas station that wants to compete with you.
That is not analogous, as online travel agencies are just middlemen. I am not aware of a law anywhere requiring a seller to have to deal with middlemen.
There's also the issue that you're making apples-to-pears comparison if Ryanair shows up in results. While Air France and British Airways have largely equivalent products, Ryanair's is...different.