Ryanair launches new accommodation service, powered by many including an old enemy
aTP- Arab tourism portal News- European low-cost giant Ryanair is gradually introducing a new accommodation platform, taking its inspiration in part from metasearch.
Rather than having a single provider of hotel and rental products, Ryanair will use a combination of brands that passengers can get an initial view of options for in a city.
The first two brands integrated into the Ryanair Rooms service are Hotels.com and Hotelopia (the consumer-facing brand of HotelBeds).
Passengers are shown “from” prices for both brands, with the user sent after clicking on a provider to a landing page with a full list of properties and the usual filter tools.
Bookings are made on the Ryanair Rooms website using a white label from each brand.
Ryanair says further providers rwill be added to the mix in the coming weeks and months.
The airline signalled in June this year that it would be overhauling its accommodation service, having previously worked with Booking.com as its exclusive provider since 2009.
The new Ryanair Rooms was touted at the time as another way to “disrupt the travel industry once more” by chief marketing officer, Kenny Jacobs.
It is also part of the wider “Always Getting Better” initiative, dubbed by Jacobs when talking about its website to be the “Amazon of air travel” with more than just air tickets available to passengers.
Booking.com’s on-off partnership for the last seven years (there was an interruption of two years when Hotelscombined picked up the contract) was the longest that Ryanair had with a third party after a number of partners came and went quickly in the mid-2000s.
Most acrimoniously was the end of the relationship it had with Expedia, after the pair fell out over the terms of their contract which ran only from March 2007 to November 2008.
In a spat that ended up in the courts, Expedia was asked to cough up around £4 million after Ryanair claimed a failure of payments by the OTA during its contract to supply hotel search and bookings functionality to the airline’s website.
Booking.com later picked up a similar deal in April 2012 to power the same for low-cost arch rival EasyJet.
Expedia Inc owns the Hotels.com service, one of the brands powering the new Ryanair Rooms channel.
Source :https://www.tnooz.com/article/ryanair-new-accommodation-service-october-2016/
