Ryanair is a leading low-cost airline that offers cheap flights, and that’s pretty much it. You definitely do not book through them for a luxurious flight.
After reading Ryanair’s annual report and other documentations about the company, I’ve discovered they’ve been having troubles with screenscraper websites such as eDreams. Those websites sell Ryanair’s tickets through their own websites, without necessarily matching the actual prices on Ryanair’s website. They sometimes turn out to be higher.
I wonder why people would go through the trouble of using those sites, as it is pretty well known that, in Europe, Ryanair is the cheapest (in most cases). In my opinion, those people use these websites because of the way they search: they want a cheap flight, but don’t always have a destination in mind.
As shown below, eDreams allows you to search with the destination “Anywhere”. It then offers you a list of cities available, starting with the cheapest one.
Similarly, you notice that the top referring site to Ryanair is Skyscanner, which also allows you to search without a destination. It will return the cheapest flights possible, looking at many airlines. Most of the time, Ryanair will end up being the cheapest.
The problem with Skyscanner is that it won’t show you if there are several flights by Ryanair during the same day. It doesn’t really allow you to “mix and match”. It’s a very handy tool, but definitely not perfect.
Which is why I couldn’t help but wonder: was there such a way of searching for flights on Ryanair? Well yes, as it turns out, there is! It’s just very well hidden.
The Fare Finder tool was launched in 2013, meaning even though I have used Ryanair hundreds of times since then, I only discovered its existence because of a school project!
Back in 2014, Michael O’Leary said:
“On the customer experience side, we moved allocated seating, a much simpler, easier-to-use website with a fare finder facility which customers are really responding very favorably to.
Our website, which was worst-in-class is now moving very rapidly to being becoming best-in-class. You can now get through it very quickly to make a booking.
The fare finder facility is unique and something that passengers are responding very, very favorably to. In fact we note that one of competitors – Easyjet – recently announced their plans to copy our fare finder, but they won’t have it for a number of months yet.”
So if it’s so favourable, why isn’t it made more obvious?? This is definitely a UX problem, so let’s see how we can fix it!
To read more about Ryanair:
My Journey in Web Design 