Booking.com sold between just 13,489 and 33,205 Ryanair flights per year to US customers over the past four years, a minuscule percentage of the airline’s total passenger count of 184m in its last financial year, court documents have shown.
Following a court victory in Delaware, where the jury awarded Ryanair only $5,000 in damages for claims of screen-scraping, the airline is seeking a permanent injunction to prevent Booking.com from selling its flights without an agreement.
Ryanair alleges that Booking.com’s unauthorised access to its website has caused it “irreparable harm,” compromising its control over sales, customer experience, and brand reputation. Booking.com has formally rejected Ryanair’s attempts to secure the injunction.
Ryanair lawyers shared: 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. 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.”
