Europe’s biggest discount airline, Ryanair, has reached a deal with one online travel agency to include Ryanair flights in the vacation packages it sells, the first time the Ireland-based airline has been willing to work with a packager.
Loveholidays, one of the UK’s biggest sellers of package holidays, will now be able to include Ryanair in its offerings, and the cost to travelers will not be higher than if they booked direct under the agreement, which may become a template for arrangements with other online operators.
Ryanair has been involved in a long-running legal fight with packagers and flight search engines, calling them ‘pirates’ and accusing them of taking excessive markups on Ryanair’s fares and fees while not sharing passenger information with the airline, preventing it from communicating about changes or, on the other hand, trying to win the business for itself.
One result of that dispute has been that a number of online search engines including Kayak have dropped Ryanair from their searches, and Ryanair’s competitors, including EasyJet and Tui have made the package tour business a cornerstone of their operations.
