Ryanair told to stop insulting Spanish website

Ryanair has won a court case against the Spanish 'screen scraping' website Atrapalo, but has been ordered to stop using the term 'bastards' to describe the company. The Constitutional Court in Barcelona this week ruled that the Irish airline is entitled, under Spanish law, to distribute its airfares exclusively on it own website.

However, the court has banned Ryanair from publicly describing the website Atrapalo as “bastards”, although it may continue to refer to such websites as “parasites of the sector”, “dead wood” and “illegal sellers”.



Screen scraping, a tool used by a number of price comparison websites, lifts details from one website to produce a mirror of the original page on another, allowing bookings to be made with an airline without visiting the airline’s official website.

Ryanair has successfully taken legal action against similar websites in Britain, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands. “Websites such as Atrapalo have for too long been getting away with unauthorised reselling of Ryanair’s flights, with the addition of charges which consumers don’t pay when they book directly with Ryanair,” said Stephen McNamara, a spokesman for Ryanair.