Ryanair is seeking injunction preventing travel firm from accessing its website
Michael O’Leary. Photo: Getty
Internet travel giant Booking.com only sold between 13,489 and 33,205 Ryanair fights per year to US consumers over a four-year period, the airline has noted in a court filing in Delaware where it is trying to secure a permanent injunction to prevent the company selling its flights after winning a legal battle there during the summer.
Following a jury trial, Ryanair won its case against Booking.com, having accused the group of screen-scraping its fares.
The jury awarded Ryanair just $5,000 (€4,490) in damages.
Ryanair group chief executive Michael O’Leary conceded following the airline’s annual general meeting in September that Booking.com isn’t currently selling the carrier’s flights on its website.
However, the airline has insisted on attempting to secure the permanent injunction in the US to prevent Booking.com from doing so in the future without an agreement between the pair.
But in court documents filed to back up its request, Ryanair has revealed the number of flights Booking.com sold to US customers in the past four years.
The airline carried 184 million passengers in its last financial year. So the number of seats Booking.com sold every year to customers in the US amounted to just a miniscule percentage of the overall passenger numbers handled by the airline every year.
Ryanair said the amount of seats sold by Booking.com to customers in the US were valued at between €555,000 and just under €1.4m a year.
“Ryanair’s proposed injunction seeks to enjoin Booking.com from directing, encouraging, and inducing other parties to access the protected portion of the Ryanair website,” lawyers for the airline have said in court filings.
The carrier claims it was “irreparably harmed” by Booking.com accessing its website.
“The harm is not simply Booking.com’s unauthorised access but Ryanair’s loss of control over who accesses its website, including who sells its flights, its customer’s booking experience, its brand reputation, and the distribution model of its own flights.”
Its lawyers have added: “A $5,000 monetary award is plainly not adequate to remedy the harms that Ryanair suffered from Booking.com selling one million Ryanair flights without authorisation, with the intent to defraud, and inducing third parties to access the myRyanair website likely millions of times.”
Booking.com has strongly rejected Ryanair’s efforts to have the injunction granted.