Ryanair Fined €256m Over ‘abusive Strategy’ to Limit Ticket Sales by Otas
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The €256M fine slapped on Ryanair for allegedly using "abusive strategies" to limit ticket sales by online travel agencies (OTAs) has sparked a lively debate about the airline's tactics and the broader issue of currency conversion shenanigans. Commenters chimed in with their own horror stories of being misled or ripped off by merchants and payment processors, with some pointing out that being charged unfavorable exchange rates is an age-old problem. While some argued that merchants should be transparent about exchange rates, others noted that savvy consumers can avoid getting taken for a ride by simply choosing to pay in their local currency. As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that Ryanair's antics are just the tip of the iceberg in a much larger conversation about fair business practices and consumer protection.
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I’m finding this more and more. Uber does it, and even Walgreens does it when I’m in the US and tap my card it suggests that I pay in my home currency. This seems to be a new vector companies have found for ripping off their customers.
Isn't that fairly easy to estimate? If they're showing you a buy rate and a sell rate, you know the interbank rate is going to be pretty much halfway between the two. I don't think anyone's changing money and thinking the bureau isn't profiting.
People use these desks because they think that’s just “what it costs.”
I had that with very small shops in non-touristy areas of Mexico where it was absolutely clear to not be a scam attempts by the shops owner. They had no idea what the terminal asked.
So if your Mexican merchants "don't know" what their terminal says? Either you were their first foreigner, or they're useful idiots, or they know.
He could have merely been the first to do the math and bring it up. I could easily see most tourists overlooking this sort of thing, or not mentioning it because they're already accustomed to it.
For my part, I'd just always assumed the charge would be ultimately converted by my bank in any case. Seems obvious now I look back, but I honestly just didn't think about the trick.
Just as an example that gives evidence for this, sometimes you'll go to the same place multiple times and the norm is they ask but occasionally someone won't. So it's not a policy.
I presume the people who don't just don't know about it, don't want to bother me and aren't aware it will make a difference.
Their payment processor (the people they rent the machine off of) offers them this oppurtunity to 'unlock hidden revenue for merchants'[1][2][3] and they are happy to do this.
Visa in fact tried to ban it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_currency_conversion
Of course, there are regulations and agreements with various institutions that should be followed - but it's free money for the shop, nothing else.
[1] https://www.shift4.com/blog/dynamic-currency-conversion-unlo...
[2] https://www.fexco.com/payments-and-fx/currency-conversion-so...
[3] https://docs.adyen.com/point-of-sale/currency-conversion/
Makes sense that shop owners in non-touristy areas haven't seen them before, as you'll only see that when the card has a default currency that differs from the default currency of the terminal.
Charging significantly more to accept foreign currencies goes back thousands of years.
There is however one very good argument for. Currencies with very high volatility. Think extreme inflation. If you accept their conversion you know what you pay in your own currency. You have then mitigated a risk. If your own currency is volatile then you might gamble and win. If the foreign currency is volatile you will usually win by paying in the foreign currency. If both are volatile then it is a blind gamble.
The important part here are the settlement dates. Your bank usually do not calculate the exchange rate of the eaxct purchase time.
That is the excuse for the "service". But it is still not wanted and I consider it evil.
When traveling places with rampant inflation you will notice that sellers always negotiate 2 prices. One in the local currency and one in what is considered an easy to use hard currency such as USD or Euros. Forgeries and less cash flowing around has made it harder to use other less know but otherwise hard currencies.
So sellers never care what currency you choose to settle in as very close to zero sellers have multiple accounts on the same terminal. And those who really need it will always negotiate in different currencies.
You might have experienced something like this at times when visiting Argentina or Turkey.
So the "service" is only there for those who want to understand what they pay in their own currency or mitigate a settlement date. And will pay for it!
Local terminal holders rarely care. But the ATM mafias (such as EuroNet) do very much so. Because they actively are playing the mitigation game and are allowed to add fees.
I strongly feel this field should be very heavily regulated. But too much money is involved. And if you look at where VISA and MasterCard are located you will understand that is not a regulation happy corner of the planet.
If you’re in a place that wants dollars or euros because their currency is “bad” (volatile or unable to freely exchange for dollars), they prefer dollars. You can tell because you get a better than official exchange rate.
I have to say I’ve never been somewhere that the currency was so volatile the settlement date mattered. Carrying local currency would be part of your risk? This could only come up in the almost-all-digital-currency modern world.
The other thing I hate to see is people using the currency conversion desks at airports, or buying foreign currency from their banks in advance of trips. They give you awful rates.
Assuming you’re traveling to a civilized country, just stick your card in an ATM when you land and pull out the cash you need. Good banks don’t even charge their own ATM fee, so your total cost is the $3-4 that the ATM owner charges, and you get a pretty fair rate.
Also people buy currency locally - before the trip - where I am from, and all the rates are displayed, both in a bank or in currency exchange. You can compare. And even when someone is lazy they can just ask friends which place has the best rates, everybody seems to know which (and the answers are true and conistent, I checked). Buying locally at a currency exchange is the cheapest option.
If I've just arrived home with $30 left of whatever currency was used in the place I came from, they could be taking a 30% cut and it would still be worth it to just due it there rather than physically visiting a bank.
That is, if the currency is one they're even willing to exchange.
Needed to get another member of staff to explain to her that the local currency option would work fine.
Although it is amusing to imagine an ATM that accosts you verbally with smalltalk when you use it.
Stuff like that is what I say "years ago" - I haven't used PayPal for a while now, and I won't use it again.
But this is why Revolut and WISE cards are a god send when travelling, just load them up with the local currency and these issues disappear.
For example, just the other day I fat fingered the screen and chose the wrong currency.
I can never remember which option should I pick. And to be really honest I don't remember if I tried to see if it matched my bank's rate or not
How quaint even the 90s seem today, and we though that was hyper capitalism!
How old a saying is caveat emptor?
Old enough to learn that it's a sociopathic stance that has no business in a well-functioning society.
You're arguing in favor of what's essentially a scam.
Advertised “No Fee” currency conversions, but a HUGE spread built into the conversion rate that comes out to a massive fee.
> I will only use them if I have literally no other choice
Even with the £20 increase they were likely cheaper than the alternative, if it exists. If this is going to push you into not using them, basically every other airline will be ruled out for you. EasyJet are exactly the same. BA/KLM/Air France/Aer Lingus are all the same on their short hop flights (I’ve actually never flown Lufthansa so I can’t comment on them). The short haul European routes are a race to the bottom.
Honestly, on many routes, I think this is true far less often than it used to be.
You forgot to mention picking the "No I don't need travel insurance" option shoved in the middle of the list of travel insurance prices, which defaults to you buying travel insurance from Ryanair.
Do you already have their spyware app installed and tracking you on your phone, to avoid being charged £50 for a plain boarding pass which you print yourself?
You're describing some other airline's website, surely. If you'd used Ryanair's site you would not be unaware of its fuckery.
And clicking "I don't need insurance" is easy.
If you take your time and read carefully. Because sometimes the colored choice is free, and sometimes it is the non-colored one. 100% dark pattern. As is disabling "paste" on check-in, forcing you to remember the 6-alphanumeric char booking code if you do not have a second device/pen&paper at hand.
They didn't choose to remove those fees - they were legally compelled to: https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-forbids-ryanair-from-char...
Dark patterns are still sketchy and unconscionable, regardless of how easy you find them to get past. They're put there by unscrupulous businesses to catch some people -- can you say no Ryanair customer has ever accidentally purchased Ryanair insurance they didn't need?
Similarly, their latest wheeze, that you skipped over, is to compel people to use their "app". The trading standards regulators need to smack Ryanair about the head with a cricket bat and again force them not to apply such bollocks.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/ryanair...
> Indeed, when I checked in for my 12 November flight to Germany a day ahead, I was told: “Make sure to print and bring your boarding passes to the airport or access them through the Ryanair app” and even “boarding passes must be printed for use”.
> But Ryanair says those are no longer acceptable. Oddly, though, you can use a paper boarding pass that is printed out at the airport by ground staff working for Ryanair – at no charge.
Such utter bollocks. They are totally capable of accepting paper boarding passes (or screenshots or PDFs of boarding passes shown on a phone -- better airlines let you download a PDF from their website once checked in, and you can put it on your phone or print it out; no proprietary app needed), they just want to compel you to install their app and get tracked and dinged and marketed at and upsold up the wazoo with zero benefit to you. It is not necessary at all, and I will continue to never travel with them.
(The number of upsells is such that it made a song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id-zzOGnN6A )
As for OTAs, major reason for blocking them are they scams (I have experience with Kiwi). Flight gets cancelled and refunded? Kiwi pockets the refund, does not give anything to customer. There is a problem, and customer needs help from airline? Too bad, because they can not provide booking email or credit card. Changes in seat or luggage? Too complicated for OTAs.
To make sure I had remembered that correctly I looked it up and here is a description of it:
https://www.insurancetimes.co.uk/ryanair-to-change-hidden-tr...
I'm not surprised, but still a bit impressed by the ability to lie like this. Somehow I doubt even 9% of their passengers would know it was between Denmark and Finland.
Conference video showing this example from 2010: https://youtu.be/zaubGV2OG5U?si=8PkLWhxHFSGQWuWw&t=597
Wild company, but they are entirely on brand.
To be fair, consumers have driven airlines this way. They’ve shown that they’ll buy based almost entirely on price and suffer any amount of agony in exchange.
I just don’t find basic economy or early flights or shitty airlines worth the bad stress.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/ryanair-ceo-talks-free-sex-o...
> He then asked the translator the German word for oral sex. After being told there wasn't one, he remarked "terrible sex life in Germany".
I used Ryanair a lot while studying abroad in Europe and the €20 flights were real if you jumped through the hoops, which was quite magical.
I once had a flight booked to Paris, but it landed in an airport 2 hours outside of Paris and the train/bus would’ve been 2x the flight cost, so being short of money I just didn’t take the trip and lost €20 :)
It's a mistake that I will only make once and never again!
BoFA does this for international wires as well. And I suspect a lot of companies do this to their international customers too. Unfortunately, it’s become pretty standard
The only place in I've had any troubles paying with card (or easily find a cashmachine) in recent time have been Turkey outside the big cities.
Why isn't Ryanair allowed to prohibit use of their website by resellers?
Like running the only gas station in town and then refusing to sell fuel to a competitor who is trying to build a gas station that wants to compete with you.
To give a more general answer than the sibling comment, setting conditions on how a product may be used usually distorts the market, harms buyers, and reduces competition, naturally to the benefit of the one setting the conditions.
For example selling cars that you're not allowed to use for "professional" use, only personal (as Nvidia does with forbidding datacenter use of some of its GPUs, charging extra for it). There was also a self-driving company that forbade buyers from using their cars to create a taxi service, essentially reserving that market for themselves. It may have been Tesla, but I can't find the story right now. In general living in a world where we need manufacturer's permission to do anything is less than ideal.
In this case I'm sure Ryanair would like to spin it as resellers upcharging customers, but by complete coincidence, their practices also prevent someone knowledgeable in all their dark patterns from protecting customers from them by acting as an intermediary.
Ryanair is cheap, they charge extra for everything. But the tradeoff is you get where you are going for cheap if you avoid all the extras, including bottled water.
I just now booked a ticket on gotogate, paid 80 euro and received a receipt from ITA airways for 120 euro. They apparently lost 40 euro on this sale, I only had to click "no" on about 18 questions.
In my case in 2020 I had to request my refund via PayPal for Vayama
Whenever I fly, I always take an empty water bottle through security and then fill it in the secure zone.
Ryanair are idiots to not accept free sales.
The OTAs are idiots for wanting to sell Ryanair flights without gaining a commission.
And the biggest idiots are the Italian court who sticks their filthy fingers in this whole business.
I don't think thats correct, people who use travel agents do so because they like the service or are unable to book for themselves, it's not wrong to offer a service and be paid for it and there isn't any broad evidence that travel agents misrepresent anything.
I wonder how that works out for them.
I also wonder if the time is ripe for some company to disrupt advertising by simply doing what google did on launch in 2000.
UK gov is too busy enforcing the death of anonymity online anyway.
I know it happens in other countries, but can you actually get away with this in a civilized and non-authoritarian country today? Eventually you're gonna have to do/say something about it, if people keep opening up new cases about it.
> ... or no one bothers to enforce them any more?
Which is strange, because why wouldn't the UK enforce UK law? There is no such thing as "EU-wide laws" as I previously explained, so again I'm not sure why other EU citizens are being pulled into context here, it literally doesn't matter.
If no one is enforcing UK law, then obviously that's bad, but on another level. I'm not sure what point you're trying to do here. For example, if a company today breaks GDPR and I want to report them, then I'm gonna be engaging with my local agencies for that, regardless of where the company is based, assuming I'm in a EU country. There is no "EU bureau" you report to, since the company is breaking your local laws, you report them to your local authorities.
As far as I can tell by the context, you don't quite grok how EU regulations are actually implemented in reality, which is why you keep bring up other EU citizens, but it really doesn't matter. When GDPR came into effect, it's because the countries themselves have written and implemented local laws in their countries that align with GDPR, there isn't one "GDPR-law" that is enforced by an EU entity across the entire union.
Amusingly my voluntary subscription was just under the cut-off amount and I cancelled it as soon as this came in. I bought a subscription to The Economist instead.
When I called to cancel and gave my reason as the paywall, they were very confused, but I knew what I was doing.
You have the choice of not viewing the website.
But the EU posted a press release last year that they are investigating this, as it could breach the DMA. [1]
The Guardian doesn't fall under the DMA though.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
"Ryanair’s tactics included rolling out facial recognition procedures for people who bought tickets via a third party, claiming that was necessary for security. It then “totally or intermittently blocked booking attempts by travel agencies”, including by blocking payment methods and mass-deleting accounts. The airline then “imposed partnership agreements” on agencies which banned sales of Ryanair flights in combinations with other carriers, and blocked bookings to force them to sign up. Only in April this year did it allow agencies’ websites to link up with its own services, allowing effective competition. The competition authority said Ryanair’s actions had “blocked, hindered or made such purchases more difficult and/or economically or technically burdensome when combined with flights operated by other carriers and/or other tourism and insurance services”.
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