Ryanair Holdings plc today (Wed, 3 Jan) released December 2023 traffic stats as follows:

OTA Pirate Update:

In early Dec, most of the larger OTA Pirates (such as Booking.com, Kiwi, Kayak, etc.) suddenly removed Ryanair’s flights from sale on their websites. This welcome removal may be the result of pressure from Consumer Protection Agencies or a response to the recent Irish High Court ruling, which granted Ryanair a permanent injunction against screenscraper Flightbox from unlawfully scraping Ryanair.com content for OTA’s, or in response to Ryanair’s KYP (Know Your Passenger) customer initiatives such as verification.

While these OTA Pirates only account for a small fraction of Ryanair’s bookings, we expect the sudden removal of our flights from these OTA websites to reduce short term load factors by 1% or 2% in Dec and Jan and also to soften short term yields as we respond by making more low fares available directly to consumers. We do not expect this recent removal of OTA Pirate bookings will materially affect our FY24 traffic or PAT guidance.

Ryanair will respond to this welcome removal of our flights from OTA Pirate websites, by lowering fares where necessary to encourage all passengers to book directly on Ryanair.com where they are guaranteed to always get the lowest air fares without OTA Pirate overcharges, fake contact info, or other pricing/refund scams. In the meantime, Ryanair continues to make its fares available to honest/transparent OTA’s such as Google Flights, who do not add hidden mark ups to Ryanair prices and who direct passengers to make their bookings directly on the Ryanair.com website.