Re:Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in ...
by mschuster91 on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @09:08AM
(#41045596)
> Airline tickets are not a commodity, full stop.
Why are they not? It's not like there are any airlines beyond oil sheikh owned ones that actually deliver customer service. The only reasonable choice a customer may have is to choose between operators that fly Boeing deathtraps or not.
The commodity is getting transported from A to B, getting treated like shit including getting groped by TSA or its equivalent, and not getting replacement for a bag that's marked as "lost" when it's actually clearly trackable with an AirTag to some bowels of any in-between airport.
Re:Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in ...
by inopinatus on Thursday July 25, 2024 @02:17AM
(#41065278)
Setting aside the parts of this question that sound like bitter personal experiences, the simple answer is that commodities are traded on commodity markets. If one doesn’t exist, it’s because no-one has figured out how. In this case it’ll be because bookings aren’t fungible and the services not identical.
because:
> flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity
Airline tickets are not a commodity, full stop. They form a contract for a service between the airline and the customer. They're not a bag of fucking apples. Travel agents, when arranging air fares, are agents in the legal sense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency) and not resellers. Booking.com were screwed on that front because they were deceptive in the particulars, a failure of good faith dealing that undermines the claim of agency.