Travel Weekly Blog

Were you surprised at news that Ryanair's booking system would be down for three days while the airline finally makes its site compliant with new OFT pricing rules?

Of course you were. Everyone was. So I'm glad Alex Bainbridge, a go-to blogger for this type of thing, has posted some thoughts about what might lie behind the outage.

There must be some manual process to cause a three-day delay...if I am right, the process will be something like: take system down; change loaded prices in live reservation system (manual process); upload new functionality that corresponds to new style of loaded prices; put system back up

So is this, or something similar, the technical card that Ryanair played to win a reprieve from OFT rules while other carriers put their houses in order?

It sounds plausible. Alex also speculates about Ryanair making a 'political point' with the downtime, but rightly dismisses the idea: for Ryanair three days without online bookings is as good as three days without bookings at all, and no political point is worth that.

For our readers the key question would be whether this explanation for the downtime could justify Ryanair missing two OFT deadlines (July 31 2007 and February 1 2008) for pricing changes. Alex, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts...

Nathan Midgley, web producer