Why do we need price comparison websites?
A free market should be an honest market. A free market which is dishonest is not ultimately free. The purpose of having a free market is to establish as far as possible prices that are fair, fair to the buyer and fair to the seller.
If you want to buy something, some fish or some baked beans or some roof tiles or cables, you visit the shops, and buy what you think is the best at the best price that you can get. You cannot do this so easily when you want to buy an extension to your home or hire a lawyer to issue a writ; in these cases you have to look at brochures and get recommendations and detailed quotations after your supplier has assessed what is involved.
You can also click onto the internet and see what is on offer there. It will often be the same suppliers with the same offerings at different prices. This in theory should be easier than a visit to the shops but practice and theory differs.
The greatest thing about the internet is that it makes information available to everyone who has it. If you want to know what the cost of goods or services are, almost anywhere in the world, you can with diligent research gain a good idea.
In fact there is so much information available on the internet that you need to filter it.
Unfortunately there is also plenty of disinformation out there.
In order to help you make a choice as to which goods or services are the cheapest some companies have started price comparison websites. These sites list the various prices that are on offer for goods and services but their listing is made complicated by (a) they have to compare different qualities and tariffs (b) sometimes it is just not possible to put a price for something until you have undertaken a survey or specific costing and (c) many sellers try to keep prices organised in a way so that comparison is hard (d) some comparison sites earn commission from the goods and services they recommend (e) some comparison sites add a fee to the price to pay for their comparison service and (f) some providers of goods and services now advertise that a particular deal is not available from the internet.
If you want to buy a mobile phone service in the UK you would have thought that getting the best value would be easy to find on the internet, as there are only five or so major suppliers. If it was easy to find out who was offering the best value then there would be only one major company operating in this field – the cheapest. It is the same with energy; there is a confusing maze of tariffs that any comparison site has to work hard to figure out and you have to put in information that you might not always want to give or even have.
It seems that some businesses really feel that comparison websites are disadvantaging their business and are taking steps to prevent people from using them. Ryanair is a case in point.
Ryanair will, it seems, cancel thousands of bookings that have been made through internet comparison sites. It seems that Ryanair’s small print allows them to do this, which in itself is an astonishing situation, because Ryanair want to make it (in their terms) illegal but in more accurate legal parlance a breach of contract for any of its customers to book through a comparison site.
I suppose that sums up organisations like Ryanair.
They make excuses that the activities of the comparison sites slows down the Ryanair web service (I have never found it slow) and that they do not have passenger contact details in case of cancellations, so really they are doing all this for the benefit of passengers. Sophistry.
All of these matters can be easily overcome, but Ryanair like all such organisations, aim towards being a monopoly and a web comparison site may show that sometimes they are not the best value.
Transparency and concern about passengers that do not have easy access to the internet or the ability to understand and use a computer ranks nowhere on Ryanair’s agenda.
I suppose that you could expect little else from a company that seems to believe that climate change is not exacerbated by airline emissions and that airlines should be allowed to fly without they or their passengers paying for the pollution that is caused; that bill can be picked up by those who do not fly.
We need web comparison sites. We probably need a comparison site to compare web comparison sites. Ryanair ought to understand that its small print flies in the face of what is fair and reasonable.
Filed under: carbon emissions, climate change, energy, pollution, Travel Tagged: | flying, Ryaniar, web comparison sites
Hi, you talk about the “Ryanair web service”, can you please tell me where I can use it?
thank you
Lorenzo
agree with you Rick, the laws surrounding Internet Intellectual property etc are a little hazy.. and generally governence of Internet sites is inadequate
The Government should have stepped in (and still should) to make it known that booking on these sites is illegal (if it is) and insist on a cooling down period with a public announcement to give clear information on the situation. For Ryanair to throw this at the unsuspecting traveller when they arrive at the airport is out of order and one can only hope Ryanair will pay the price for their flagrant disregard of their customers.
Interesting, I can probably shed a bit of light onto this (cause I have worked on internet technologies for the last 10 years or so)
Basically a web sites content is the intellectual property of the author (in this case Ryanair) and as such have the right to control how is used outside of their web site. Normally if you want to share information you do it via an RSS feed (although there are other ways (i.e SOAP)
But you can (i’ve done this a few times) you can write a code engine which you can point to a web site and “scrape” the content from it so that it can be used (i.e displayed on your own web site) without the authors permission, its called “syndication”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication
What the comparison site is probably doing is using syndication to extract the information needed from the Ryanair site (without permission) and then displaying it on their site (and generating revenue via advertising, or possibly even adding a percentage to the transaction and then purchasing the flight from Ryanair themselves)
Its seems a bit draconian of Ryanair to cancel all flights made from comparison sites, but there might well be a good reason for them doing this (most likely controlling the point where the transaction occurs, cause the comparison site would cancel the transaction if the flight cost is higher than what is being displayed on their site because of reduced availablity for example)
A disgrace and i wonder whether their conditions provide that th fares are refunded.
What happens if a family who has booked through one of these sites becasue they don’t know how to use a computer turns up at the airport for their holiday and gets their tickest cancelled? It’s a disgrace.