Ryanair Holidays is back online a month to the day on from its suspension, with German package travel specialist HLX Touristik, a division of Hapag-Lloyd Express acting as new provider
HLX Touristik, which also powers the package trip platforms for Lufthansa and AirBerlin. was enlisted the help of existing partner World2Meet to run the service on its behalf through a white label.
The new platform uses the booking engine of Peakwork and has access to 20,000 hotels from the World2Meet bedbank.
Ryanair Holidays was taken offline at the end of January this year, due to what it claimed was “illegal screenscraping and mis-selling” of flights by the company powering it, LogiTravel.
Some 200 destinations on the Ryanair network are available in the packages.
Ryanair Holidays is part of a wider programme at the airline to become, in its words, “the Amazon of air travel”.
The new Rooms brand restarted again in October last year through Expedia Inc-owned Hotels.com and Hotelopia, the consumer-facing wing of Hotelbeds.
Similar to the first version of Ryanair Holidays, a limited roll-out is expected for the relaunched Ryanair Holidays, currently live in Germany, Ireland and England, with Italy and Spain coming on stream in the coming weeks.
A Ryanair official said: “we temporarily suspended our Holidays service last month, and terminated our agreement with the software provider who was found to be unlawfully scraping Ryanair’s low fares. We will not allow any 3rd party software provider to ‘screenscrape’ and unlawfully re-sell Ryanair’s low fares.”
