Ryanair dealt setbacks in lawsuits against Lastminute.com and Booking.com

Ryanair has aggressively battled online travel agencies over the years, seeking to bar them from selling its flights, and recently was dealt setbacks in separate litigation against Lastminute.com in Switzerland and Booking.com in the US. Ryanair has fought aggressively to get passengers to go directly to its own website to book their flights. In Switzerland, Lastminute.com announced last week that it had won a court case several weeks ago related to the selling of Ryanair flights. Following a 15-year legal battle with the the airline, the Supreme court in Switzerland granted Lastminute.com the right to sell Ryanair flights.The Supreme Court decision was called “a major milestone” by the online travel and leisure retailer as well as “a win for consumers,” Lastminute.com stated. The court cited Ryanair’s propensity to launch aggressive campaigns about sales of its flights on third-party websites, ruling that this was “contrary to the Federal Law Against Unfair Competition.” The court ordered Ryanair to pay Lastminute.com 49,000 Swiss Francs ($54,522) in compensation. Two parallel appeal decisions confirmed that Lastminute.com and its subsidiary BravoNext acted lawfully and will be allowed to continue offering customers the option to compare alternative prices for Ryanair flights through websites such as Lastminute.com, Volagratis.com and Bravofly.com. A lower court found that Lastminute.com did not violate any intellectual property rights laws or any breaches in contractual obligations with Ryanair. “The court case wins in Switzerland took 15 years, but eventually, the selling of Ryanair flights was vindicated and confirmed as lawful,” Lastminute.com spokesperson Kirsten Beacock said in an email. “The judgment called out the aggressive media campaign by Ryanair as unfounded — but we would like to draw a line under this and we will be reaching out to Ryanair to try and move forward from this.”<br/>