Ryanair has secured a significant legal victory against the online travel agency eDreams in Germany. The court ruled in favor of Ryanair, highlighting eDreams’ practice of overcharging its customers excessive fees when Ryanair flights were booked through its website. This ruling, coupled with a similar one in the United States, where the Delaware Court found Booking Holdings violating the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, sheds light on the airline industry’s battle against unfair practices.
The Berlin Regional Court found eDreams’ €3.88’service fee’ excessive and therefore unlawful and ruled that eDreams’ ‘Flexfare’ was misleading. It did not allow passengers to change the date and time of their flights without incurring airline change fees.
In addition, the Berlin Regional Court granted Ryanair an injunction against eDreams Prime’s terms and conditions. eDreams Prime claimed it would only provide discounts up to the value of the annual subscription, but this was deemed false advertising. Ryanair accused eDreams Prime of overcharging consumers and called them a “pirate OTA.” Ryanair also mentioned that eDreams is the last major “pirate OTA” in Europe that continues illegally crawling Ryanair’s website and overcharging consumers for airfares and ancillary services.
The airline emphasized that most other significant OTAs in the European Union have signed Ryanair’s ‘Authorized OTA’ agreements, committing to displaying accurate prices and sharing payment details with the airline to protect customers from scams like the one perpetrated by eDreams.
Ryanair’s head of marketing, Dara Brady, highlighted the importance of eDreams’ compliance with the OTA distribution agreement, urging them to ‘stop overcharging consumers ‘.
