The High Court has refused Ryanair’s application for an interlocutory injunction that would have required Skyscanner to ensure online travel agents using its website provided Ryanair with passengers’ personal email addresses when booking Ryanair flights. The court said the requested order was mandatory in substance and, in any event, was not justified on the balance of justice. It will hear counsel on the form of the final order.
The ruling, delivered by Mr Justice Twomey on 30 July 2020, concerns an interim application in Ryanair’s substantive proceedings against Skyscanner Limited, Skyscanner Holdings Limited and Skyscanner 2018 Limited. Ryanair’s main action seeks, among other relief, to prevent Skyscanner from facilitating the sale of Ryanair flights by online travel agents. A date for the substantive hearing had not been fixed.
Ryanair said some agents booking its flights used an agent-created email address instead of the passenger’s own address. It argued that passengers could then struggle to access or manage bookings and that the practice could cause delays involving assistance, flight changes, health contacts and notifications. Ryanair also said it wanted to contact passengers directly. Skyscanner argued that the order would require it to monitor independent agents and potentially change its business model. The judgment noted that Skyscanner was not itself selling the flights or supplying the agent-created addresses to Ryanair; the agents did that when completing bookings.
The judge found Ryanair had an arguable claim that Skyscanner’s conduct might breach Ryanair’s website terms, but did not find that Ryanair had shown a strong case likely to succeed at trial, as required for an order mandatory in substance. The legality of the parties’ conduct, including the alleged screen-scraping and the disputed status of their licence agreement, was left for the trial judge.
The court also considered the application on the assumption that the injunction was prohibitive. It concluded that the balance of justice still did not support granting it. Among its reasons, the court said Ryanair could reduce the identification problems by using other passenger information; much of the cited evidence was not shown to involve bookings made through Skyscanner or concerned incidents before 11 November 2019; and the agents, rather than Skyscanner, were the direct source of the email addresses at issue. The court also considered the ongoing monitoring the order would require and its potential effects on Skyscanner.
The ruling decides only the interlocutory application. It does not determine the underlying claims or decide whether the alleged conduct was unlawful.