Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary doesn’t think US trial in case against Booking.com will start as planned

Ryanair group chief executive Michael O’Leary doesn’t believe that the trial of a case it has taken against internet giant Booking.com will go ahead next month as planned in the United States.

Ryanair sued Booking Holdings and subsidiaries including Booking.com in 2020 over alleged screen-scraping of its fares by the firms.

“I don’t think they’ll go into court,” said Mr O’Leary. “I don’t think they can afford to go into court.”

Screen-scraping involves a third party accessing an airline’s website and often offering that airline’s fares to its own customers via its own website.

Booking Holdings generated revenue of $21.4bn (€20bn) last year and posted net income of $4.2bn.

The trial is due to start on July 15 in Delaware and is pencilled in to last a week.

Mr O’Leary also doesn’t think the case will be settled in advance of the trial.

“I think they’ll keep postponing it for as long as is humanly possibly,” he told the Irish Independent.

“With the evidence we have presented to the court of these guys scamming customers, overcharging consumers – I think it’s indefensible,” said the airline boss.

“We think that’s why their senior management haven’t deposed,” he added.

“We’ve all been deposed because we have, frankly, a good story to tell. None of their senior management have been willing to undergo depositions.

"I think when you go into court and you show the scamming that these guys have been doing against consumers – duping them, overcharging them – I don’t know how you go in and defend it.”

Depositions have been taken in the case from Ryanair executives including Mr O’Leary and the airline’s chief technology officer, John Hurley.

In its US lawsuit, Ryanair has claimed damages against Booking Holdings and its subsidiaries, arguing that it has incurred costs to tackle the travel agents’ “unauthorised” access of the website.

Those costs, it has claimed, included having to beef up a programme it developed, called Shield, that is intended to block unauthorised third parties such as online travel agents (OTAs) from accessing the Ryanair website and selling its inventory.

But Booking Holdings has rejected Ryanair’s claims.

“Ryanair conceived of this lawsuit as part of its broader public relations strategy to prevent travellers from using OTAs to purchase Ryanair flights,” its lawyers have previously claimed.

“Ryanair also routinely disparages OTAs in the press, including Booking.com, as ‘a bunch of scam artists’ and ‘internet pirates’,” they also noted.

The legal team for Booking.com have also argued that Booking.com does not source flight information from ­Ryanair or any other airline and instead relies on another group, ­Etraveli, to provide the information to it.

“There is no evidence that defendants have knowledge of, a role in, or input into how their vendors obtain Ryanair flight information and book Ryanair flights, and that no defendant directs any vendor to access the Ryanair website, let alone to engage in criminal activity,” the lawyers have stated in court documents.

Ryanair has even previously accused Booking.com of being partly responsible for a “malicious attack” on the airline’s payment processing platform between September and October last year.

Booking Holdings has described the claim as “baseless”.

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