EasyJet and the payment issue

Much chatter in the industry these past few days after EasyJet opened up its product feed to leisure bookings.

Comtec has also annouced it will be handling a live feed from EasyJet in order for leisure clients to take bookings of EasyJet fares.

Much of this development is because EasyJet is trying to crack down on the seemingly endless scraping of its site, keeping many of the meta search engines in traffic.

What's the point of having a UK-focused flight meta search engine if you don't include EasyJet content, is an obvious question.

But the smallprint is very interesting. Reports suggest that EasyJet will charge £10 per booking every time a transaction is made using data from the feed.

The question is this: will an offline agent be able to persuade a customer to part with £10 just because they made the booking for them? Or will they see through it and simply go to EasyJet.com at home to secure the flight element of a trip?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution