Travel agent loses appeal over refusal to strike out Ryanair claim

An appeal over the High Court’s rejection of an application by an online travel agent seeking to have a Ryanair action against it struck out has been dismissed.

In 2010 Ryanair sued over the sale of tickets for travel on Ryanair flights as part of bespoke package holidays which On The Beach (OTB) travel agent puts together and sells to its customers.

Ryanair claimed OTB had no permission to do this. It also claimed it was in breach of Ryanair’s terms and conditions and infringed its copyright in its database.

OTB denied the claims and it first contested the jurisdiction of the Irish Courts to hear the proceedings. The High Court rejected this and in 2015 that decision was upheld by the Supreme Court.

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In 2021, OTB asked the court to dismiss Ryanair’s proceedings on grounds of inordinate and inexcusable delay.

OTB said it believed Ryanair had no intention of prosecuting its claim and instead was using the existence of the proceedings to damage OTB’s business and to smear its reputation by claiming that OTB is unlawfully screen-scraping the Ryanair website.

It was also being done to exert improper pressure on OTB in other unrelated disputes by alleging screen scraping, it claimed.

Ryanair opposed the application to strike out.

The High Court, in June 2022, found there was inordinate and inexcusable delay by Ryanair, in particular, a period of more than three years from 2017 to 2021 when Ryanair failed to take what the judge described as “any step of any kind in the proceedings”.

However, the High Court judge found the balance of justice “clearly favours the continuance of the proceedings”, so she dismissed OTB’s application.

On Monday a three-judge Court of Appeal upheld the High Court decision.

Ms Justice Caroline Costello, on behalf of the appeal court, said there was no appeal against the High Court finding that Ryanair was responsible for inordinate and inexcusable delay.

The appeal only concerned the balance of justice and whether it would be just in all the circumstances to dismiss the proceedings.

She found that, looking at it in the round and considering all of the circumstances, the case of prejudice advanced by OTB was “really very weak”. On the other hand, the prejudice to Ryanair was clear if its proceedings were dismissed at this stage, she said.

She was satisfied that the High Court judge identified the correct principles to be applied to the application and correctly applied them to the facts before her.