Screenscraping - How To Stop It

It surprised me when we started building sunshine and continues to do so today, how much the online travel industry relies on screen scraping. It must create so much extra load on airlines and tour operators hardware, as well as breaking down at the first signs of any small changes made to any of their sites.

Last week Ryanair announced they’d be cancelling any bookings made via third party sites using screen scraping. They’d also be working with their developers to make screen scraping harder (Captcha anyone?)!

At the moment it’s unclear whether they are going to cancel all bookings made from today onwards or all previous bookings, which is a Monday morning headache we and most of the travel industry don’t need! As usual Ryanair’s need to sell “ancillary” products along with their cheap flights seems to be causing them to cut off their nose to spite their face.

Flybe on the other hand, are moving to offer their search and book facilities via XML Web Services, in an admirable attempt to lessen the impact of screen scraping. By doing so they place themselves head and shoulders above their competition, finally an airline fully embracing the internet and the free sharing of information! By offering this service to third parties they can control any load issues previously created by screen scraping.

So congratulations to Flybe and booo to Ryanair.