Ryanair prepares to close booking system for weekend

Ryanair was preparing today to shut its entire booking system for the weekend.

Neither online nor telephone customers will be able to book flights between 10pm on Friday and 11pm on the following Monday while the reservations network is upgraded.

The airline, which carries around 50 million passengers a year, said: “It has been planned for over two years because of Ryanair’s continuing growth and the capacity limits of our current reservation system.”

The Office for Fair Trading (OFT) has called on Ryanair and other airlines to clarify fare prices on their websites. The regulator has ordered the airline to include unavoidable fixed costs such tax in its ticket prices.

A dozen other airlines including Aer Lingus have made changes to their website booking processes after the OFT’s ruling last year.

Ryanair said this weekend’s work had nothing to do with the OFT ruling and that it remained on track to meet a March 31 deadline for the price transparency upgrade.

The airline, which recently issued a gloomy trading forecast citing rising fuel costs and slower consumer demand, said the booking shutdown would not affect flights this weekend – or the group’s financial results.

It has taken “significant” additional advance bookings after alerting customers, and a promotion selling 500,000 seats for €6.60 in the run-up to the closure had gone “very well”, it said.

Ryanair said its free web check-in service will also not be operating during the bookings system shutdown, and that any passengers affected by this will not be charged the €3.90 airport check-in fee. Travellers who have elected to check-in online normally have up to two days before travelling to do so.

Access to the airline’s destination information, travel questions, car, hotel and insurance booking facilities will be available during the weekend.

The system shutdown was described by an e-commerce expert as “almost unheard of” when it was announced earlier this month.

Robin Goad, research director at internet analyst Hitwise, said: “It’s quite incredible. Sometimes people shut things down for two or three hours. To do so for a whole three or four days is pretty much unheard of.”

Hitwise has calculated that February is one of the busiest traffic months of the year for Ryanair, and close to annual peak volumes just after the New Year.