Ryanair claims Indonesian and Australian agents used to get flights through eDreams

High Court reporters

Online booking agency eDreams was involved in a scheme to circumvent Ryanair's new secure flight booking system for bricks and mortar travel agencies, the High Court heard.

The claim was made by Martin Hayden SC, for Ryanair, in proceedings seeking injunctions restraining

eDreams, along with an Indonesia-based agency and an Australia-based agency, from utilising or exploiting a new "travel agent direct" platform created by the airline for agencies which deal with customers calling into their offices or via the phone.

The four defendants are eDreams Odigeo SA and Vacaciones eDreams Sl, which are based in Spain, while PT Span Ocean Travel is in Jakarta and Geelong Travel in New South Wales.

Ryanair was last week granted short service of the proceedings on the defendants and service outside the jurisdiction.

Following talks between lawyers for Ryanair and eDreams on Tuesday, Mr Hayden told Ms Justice Marguerite Bolger the proceedings against the eDreams defendants had been settled on the basis of undertakings they had given. The case against the other two defendants, who did not have a representative before the court, were adjourned to next week.

The airline claimed some 22,435 Ryanair bookings have been made by PT Span through the travel agent direct platform since January 6, which is at a level of about one every three minutes and on a continuous 24-hour basis. Together with what appear to be fake customer email addresses, it suggests the bookings are being completed by bots, Ryanair said.

Ruth Comiskey, Ryanair DAC's head of litigation, said in an affidavit the airline and eDreams have a "long and fractious history" involving multi-jurisdictional disputes about flight data being scraped from the airline's website.

This latest dispute, however, concerned the covert infiltration of a secure offline distribution platform which is not available publicly and only available to brick-and-mortar agents.

eDreams has, in effect, circumvented Ryanair's controls by co-opting the direct platform accounts of PT Span and Geelong to place bookings that eDreams could not otherwise make, Ms Comiskey said.

She said that the PT Span only received approval from the airline to use the direct platform on January 6, but in a very short time had an unusually high level of bookings.

This undermines Ryanair's intention of bringing in the secure direct platform to support the bricks and mortar agents and their customers in booking flights, she said.

On February 24, following a customer complaint to Ryanair about being unable to manage her booking because the email address being used belonged to eDreams, PT Span's access to the direct platform was suspended.

Geelong, which had its direct platform application approved in July when the system first operated, had completed just short of 2,000 bookings.

Ms Comiskey said this was quite a high number given that Geelong operates out of Australia in circumstances where Ryanair is a Europe-based airline and Geelong does not appear to be associated with a larger agency which may have an offline presence.

Following a customer complaint about an eDreams booking made through Geelong, Geelong's direct platform access was also suspended on February 25.

Ryanair wrote to all the defendants, reminding them of the conditions attached to the use of the direct platform. Only Geelong responded, saying it was unaware of the explicit prohibition of the sale of Ryanair flights through online agents such as eDreams and would conduct an investigation to determine whether any bookings were made.

Ms Comiskey said there have been further customer complaints to Ryanair and has found four other travel agencies which may be doing the same thing and could be joined as defendants in the future.

She said Ryanair faced significant regulatory data, consumer and reputational risk as a consequence of eDreams' conduct.