Ryanair wants to make it harder for consumer to compare prices.

And Ryanair wants to upsell you during the buying process, which they can't do as well, if you don't buy on their site.

This is the reason.

Nothing is stopping airlines from offering 1-click bookings, except that lengthy funnels bring in tons of cash. Ryanair has been a master at this since the beginning of time.

In 2020 I booked a flight directly on Google Flights and the booking was complete before I even realized, it was so simple. I never found that UI again.

    > I booked a flight directly on Google Flights

Does anyone else have the experience where 25-50% of the click-here-to-buy from Google Flights just don't work? Is it bait-and-switch from the carrier?

The underlying systems are old, slow and have multiple layers of caching, plus it’s a huge search space, so you’re never really seeing real-time availability. It’s just the nature of it that a lot of the times the tickets are already gone, though Google used to be one of the most reliable.

It has happened for me many times, so could have some truth here

>Ryanair is against free market. They want to have monopoly, to raise prices.

This is the goal of almost every business and that isn't against the free market it is the free market and the precise reason we have regulators to ensure competition.

This is like standard business methodology these days. Nearly every company prefers this. Just ask any olympian how hard it is to even get to the olympics let alone win.

Business would much rather be proprietary and not have to work that hard.

Booking is just acting as a middleman. Booking flights are still being booked through Ryanair, which was part of the suit.

Booking.com isn't the market force keeping Ryanair's prices down.