When making bookings, third party travel agents may not provide us with any of your personal information other than your name. They often book with their own email address, phone number and payment information – not yours. This is problematic because third party travel agents often:
- Use their own payment card which makes it difficult for us to refund you directly in the event of cancellation. By using their own card and not yours, this does not provide you with any visibility over the actual cost of the Ryanair flight, ancillary service or any other service provided by Ryanair. For example, we are aware of some third-party travel agents charging customers for services that we provide for free. In one case, a third-party travel agent charged a name change fee when we provided the name change for free!
- Data privacy concerns. We are aware of cases where third party travel agents inputted the wrong email address when making a booking resulting in the customer’s booking confirmation email being sent to another individual.
- Unlawfully check-in and make dangerous goods declarations on your behalf. We have a legal obligation to obtain certain declarations from you, i.e. that your baggage does not contain dangerous goods. These declarations must be made by you as a passenger or by a duly authorized natural person with personal knowledge of you and of the contents of your luggage – not by a third-party travel agent or a bot.
- Creates customer service issues. When you contact Customer Support about an issue, we ask you to answer some security questions to verify that we are talking to the customer on the booking. Passengers who book through third party travel agents often have difficulty answering the security questions because the third-party travel agent has provided us with their own information, and not yours. Therefore, you as the customer often cannot confirm the email address used to make the booking or the last four digits of the card used to make the booking. This, in turn, means that Customer Support are unable to help you as they cannot be sure they are talking to the customer on the booking.