Ryanair has been hit with a massive fine from the Antitrust Authority: more than €255 million for abusing its dominant position.

The Italian Competition Authority (Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato) has fined Ryanair €255.7 million. The fine is for abusing its dominant position , from April 2023 to at least April 2025, as stated in a statement from the Authority, and for penalizing travel agencies for purchasing flights on its website in combination with those of other carriers.

According to the Antitrust Authority, "Ryanair holds a dominant position in the upstream market for domestic and European scheduled passenger air transport services to and from Italy, as an input for online (OTA) and physical travel agencies." This dominant position derives not only from significant and continually growing market shares (38-40% of passengers carried on all routes to and from Italy), but also from numerous other indicators, which "contribute to Ryanair's significant market power and the ability to act independently of competitors and consumers, especially considering its significant performance gap with respect to the main competing carriers."

Following a detailed investigation, the Authority specifies, it was therefore "confirmed that Ryanair implemented a complex strategy to block, hinder, or make it more difficult and/or economically or technically expensive for travel agencies, OTAs, and physical retailers to purchase flights on the ryanair.com website, in combination with flights from other carriers and/or other travel and insurance services."

Specifically, it emerged that Ryanair began evaluating a series of potential obstacles to travel agencies at the end of 2022 , which then materialized, starting in mid-April 2023, with increasingly intensive measures . In a first phase, Ryanair introduced facial recognition procedures for users of tickets purchased through agencies on its website. In a second phase—at the end of 2023, once the investigation had begun—Ryanair completely or intermittently blocked travel agencies' booking attempts on its website (for example, by blocking payment methods and massively deleting accounts linked to bookings made through OTAs). In a third phase, in early 2024, Ryanair imposed partnership agreements on OTAs and, subsequently, Travel Agent Direct agreements on brick-and-mortar agencies, with conditions restricting the agencies' ability to offer Ryanair flights combined with other services. This was achieved by using intermittent blocking of bookings and an aggressive communication campaign targeting OTAs that did not sign these agreements ("pirate OTAs") as a "persuasion" tool. In April 2025, Ryanair, by making the complete white-label iFrame solution available to OTAs, provided the integration of IT applications (so-called APIs) that, when properly implemented, restore fair competition in the downstream travel services market.

The conclusion, therefore, is that such conduct "was effectively capable of hindering the agencies' sales," jeopardizing "the agencies' ability to purchase Ryanair flights and combine them with flights from other carriers and/or additional travel services, reducing direct and indirect competition from the agencies themselves and, consequently, the quality and quantity of travel services offered to consumers."

ASSOUTENTI – "The fine is a good thing, but it's not enough," Assoutenti commented on the Antitrust statement. "Over the past three years, since the investigation began," Assoutenti stated, " Ryanair has generated a total turnover of over €30 billion: a financial magnitude that makes the fine, while significant on a formal level, ineffective as a real deterrent. Added to this is the foreseeable outcome of a lengthy legal battle between the first and second levels of proceedings, which risks diluting the impact of the measure over time." "We believe," Assoutenti concluded, "that, alongside sanctions, a measure of moral suasion is now necessary and can no longer be postponed. This intervention directly impacts the company's behavior through clear obligations of lawful conduct and a structured and consistent process of verifiable commitments over time."

(Unioneonline)