Michael O’Leary says that 90pc of Ryanair’s business from online travel agents has been restored by a series of agreements. In an interview with Eoghan Corry of Travel Extra he said he was surprised that Jet2 and TUI both said business was up during summer
The load factor dipped two points in December and January when the OTAs took us off sale. Now, with the OTA agreements, we got the load factor back up from March onwards probably at the expense of yield.
The issue for us has always been, did the OTA traffic go somewhere else, and we said, “well, we can’t see these Jet2 numbers, we can’t see Wizz numbers, but Jet2 and TUI had reasonably strong numbers for the summer, which is a bit unusual.
Everybody else is saying fares are flat or down, TUI and Jet2 and others are saying fares are up and volume is up. So maybe the OTA traffic went to the tour operators.
We’re not sure, but you know, it’s certainly there’s an element of it, it’s certainly part of why we think volume this summer strong but pricing is weak.
Of the OTAs that we identified, we have over 90pc of the by volume of the OT is now signed up and selling. The last two we are in court with, eDreams and Booking in the US. They don’t account for much, we’re doing to almost nothing with them.
