28 Feb 2017

Ryanair Holidays returns after finding new friendly web partners

A month to the day on from its suspension, Ryanair Holidays is back online with a new provider behind the scenes to power its package trips.

Ryanair took its fledgling Holidays service offline at the end of January this year, just a month after its launch, due to what it claimed was “illegal screenscraping and mis-selling” of flights by the company powering it, LogiTravel.

The European low-cost carrier has now enlisted the help (through its existing partner World2Meet) of German package travel specialist HLX Touristik to run the service on its behalf through a white label.

The new platform uses the booking engine of Peakwork and gets around 20,000 hotels from the World2Meet bedbank.

Some 200 destinations on the Ryanair network are available in the packages.

Similar to the first version of Ryanair Holidays, a limited roll-out is expected for the relaunched Ryanair Holidays – it is currently live in Germany, Ireland and the UK, with Italy and Spain coming on stream in the coming weeks, HLX says.

Confirming the relaunch, a Ryanair official says:

“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.”

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.

HLX also powers the package trip platforms for Lufthansa and AirBerlin.