Google To Team Up With RyanAir On A Flight Comparison Site
THIS is a bit of a surprise really, given RyanAir’s long standing policy on being listed upon any of the flight comparison sites like Skyscanner. That they’re going to team up with Google in order to build a site that will be incorporated into the Google home pages and search index:
There are some very exciting developments with Google, where we have been working with them on sharing the pricing.
We’ll be sharing the Ryanair pricing through all of the Google outlets, so when you go in, there’ll be route selections, cheapest prices and so on. Google are developing a price-comparison thing themselves.
They want to launch with us and we’re working with them on that kind of product. It’ll blow comparison sites like Skyscanner out of the water.
There’s more than one oddity here of course. The first being that RyanAir has never allowed anyone’s spiders (these are the bits of software that go look at a website to see what it says. All search engines and comparison sites run their spiders over other peoples’ sites in order to actually work) to look at its site. They just don’t, or at least didn’t, want anyone to know and thus be able to compare their offerings.
The second is of course that RyanAir doesn’t actually fly to airports that anyone else uses: so it seems at times when you get off a plane in supposedly Frankfurt and find yourself in Weeze or wherever. Given this it’s difficult to know what the comparisons can be.
However, being a little more serious this is the sort of thing that would make a big difference to any mooted Google flight search engine. If they can get RyanAir into their results then they’ll be the only people with that and at least here in Europe that will indeed give them an advantage.
Posted: 14th, January 2014 | In: Money, Reviews, The Consumer Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
