Ryanair has confirmed it will be unable to take online
bookings or phone bookings over a four-day period later this month,
after the website failed to comply with anOffice of Fair
Tradingrule on passenger air
taxes.
The budget airline says its website booking engine and connected
phone booking system will be offline between 10pm Friday 22
February and 11pm Monday 25 February.
"The Ryanair.com internet and call centre booking system will be
down because of the changeover to a new flight booking system,"
Ryanair has informed its passengers, of course not mentioning the
OFT dispute.
As well as new bookings not being handled, passengers already
with reservations will be unable to make any changes to their
flights or conduct any online check-ins.
The changeover was originally planned for a three-day downtime
period starting this Saturday, but the move has been postponed.
Ryanair has not explained why.
It may be linked to the fact the original plan covered the
Valentine's Day weekend, which is traditionally a busy one, and
someone at Ryanair had second thoughts about spoiling any romance
in the air.
The site is being updated to comply with the OFT rule that
prices shown to passengers should include all taxes.
Other airlines, including rival easyJet, have already complied
with the OFT demand, and Ryanair's inability to finally comply
without having to axe bookings over four days has been
criticised.
Even after finally taking action, the move will still break an
agreement Ryanair previously made with the OFT to have its house in
order by 31 January.
Ryanair has blamed "technical issues" for its failure to
comply.
Deri Jones, CEO of web application testing specialist SciVisum,
said, "Ryanair is quite well known for being a pretty shrewd
business, but taking its booking service offline for a very long
weekend is the equivalent of a high street retailer shutting up
shop for a week. Ryanair might as well include a link to easyJet's
website. It is commercial lunacy."
Jones said, "The really frustrating thing is there is no excuse,
and even no need for this downtime. It should have been planned
properly.
"There are a range of ways to plan the roll-out of a new portal
that do not require days of outage. Even an hour of outage can be
avoided if done right."
He said many companies run two sites in parallel - one customer
facing and the other internal facing. The internal site has the
upgrades done and following intense testing to ensure that it is
running smoothly, the two sites are seamlessly swapped over with no
disruption to customers.
"Ryanair are not stupid, so there must be some logic to this
excessive downtime. It is possible that careful cost management -
one of their trademarks - has resulted in under-delivery online,
and they are simply paying the price for not having planned and
executed better on this change," said Jones.
A further problem for Ryanair is that the original downtime
changeover period for this weekend was widely publicised in the
travel media and the travel industry. This means bookings could be
hit for two successive weekends - not very good for an online
business.