Ryanair, Antitrust sanction of 255.7 mln. The company: 'We will appeal'

The Antitrust has imposed on Ryanair Dac, jointly and severally with its parent Ryanair Holdings Plc, a fine of €255,761,692 for abuse of dominant position, from April 2023 to at least April 2025. This is stated in a note of the Authority.

At the end of a detailed investigation, the Authority found that 'Ryanair implemented a complex strategy to block, hinder or make more difficult and/or economically or technically burdensome the purchase of Ryanair flights on the ryanair.com website by travel agencies, Ota and individuals, in combination with flights of other carriers and/or with other tourist and insurance services'.

Ryanair, reads the note, 'holds a dominant position in the upstream market for domestic and European scheduled passenger air transport services to/from Italy, as an input to travel agencies, both online (Ota) and physical. This dominance derives not only from significant (38-40% of passengers carried on all routes to/from Italy) and continuously growing market shares, but also from numerous other indicators'.

All of these indicators contribute to Ryanair's "significant market power and ability to act independently of competitors and consumers, even considering the significant distancing from the performance of the main competing carriers". In particular, it emerged that 'Ryanair began, at the end of 2022, to examine a series of hindrance hypotheses for travel agencies, which then took the form, as of mid-April 2023, of interventions of gradually increasing intensity. In a first phase, Ryanair introduced facial recognition procedures for users of tickets purchased through an agency on its website. In a second phase - at the end of 2023, when the investigation had begun - Ryanair blocked, either totally or intermittently, booking attempts by travel agencies on its site (for example, through the blocking of means of payment and the mass deletion of accounts linked to bookings made by the Ota). In a third phase, at the beginning of 2024, Ryanair imposed partnership agreements to the TAOs and, later, Travel Agent Direct agreements to the physical agencies, with conditions limiting the agencies' ability to offer the Ryanair flight combined with other services, using as a tool of "persuasion" the intermittent blocking of bookings and an aggressive communication campaign against the TAOs that did not sign these agreements ("pirate TAOs")'.

As a final step, in April 2025, Ryanair - by making the complete whitelabel iFrame solution available to the TAOs - "provided the integration of the IT applications (the so-called APIs) that, when well implemented, allow for the restoration of proper conditions of competition in the downstream market of tourist services". Therefore, the Competition and Market Authority concluded that "the conduct described, at least until the integration of Ryanair's APIs, is suitable and has been concretely capable of hindering the agencies' sales, also affecting the acquisition of Internet traffic by the TAOs. The ascertained conducts, in short, have prejudiced the possibility of the agencies to purchase Ryanair flights in order to combine them with flights of other carriers and/or additional tourist services, reducing the competition, direct and indirect, exercised by the agencies themselves and, consequently, the quality and quantity of tourist services offered to consumers".