Ryanair Is a Missing Piece in eDreams Odigeo's Subscription Business

28.02.2024 - 17:17 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal / Dana Dunne

Don’t expect Ryanair and eDreams Odigeo to kiss and make up anytime soon.

Europe’s largest airline and the Spain-based flight online travel agency have a history of discord going back at least a decade. The result is that eDreams Odigeo doesn’t offer its customers Ryanair flights.

For that matter, neither does Expedia, Booking.com and many others.

But Ryanair announced on Wednesday a distribution agreement with On the Beach — the airline’s fourth in 2024. Other partners include TUI, as well as Kiwi and Love Holidays.

Partners must agree to offer Ryanair flights at Ryanair prices, with no added fees to the airfare. And they must pass along customer information to the airline.

Ryanair and On the Beach reached a distribution agreement despite On the Beach suing Ryanair in 2021 over pandemic refunds and a court ordering the airline to pay On the Beach $2.5 million.

During eDreams Odigeo’s earnings call Wednesday, an analyst asked about the impact of Ryanair’s new partnerships.

CEO Dana Dunne said eDreams Odigeo gets flight inventory from multiple sources, adding “that’s a scale advantage that we have.”

For example, if you search eDreams for flights from Dublin to Barcelona on any given day, you won’t see any from Ryanair but there are plenty from Vueling, Aer Lingus and Iberia.

“When you look at some of the deals that you mentioned, like for example, On the Beach or Love Holidays, those are primarily UK-based businesses that focus almost exclusively on the UK, and exclusively on the package market,” Dunne said. “This is very, very small and very different than the business that we are actually in.”

Dunne said his company evaluates all options “but we have many other options in other ways given our scale and size.”

It’s unclear how the absence of Ryanair flights is impacting the now core eDreams Prime subscription business. In exchange for paying an annual fee, members get discounts on flights and hotels, and this revenue generates most of eDreams’ business today.

In the nine months that ended December 31, 2023, the Prime subscriber base increased 38% year-over-year to 5.4 million members, the company reported Wednesday. eDreams stated that it’s on track to reaching its Prime goal of more than 7.25 members by the end of fiscal year 2025.

Using non-GAAP measures, eDreams stated that its “cash EBITDA margin” and “cash marginal profit” are improving.

However, the company is still in the red.

In the first nine months of fiscal year 2024, eDreams Odigeo narrowed its net loss to 4 million euros ($4.33 million) from a loss of 34.1 million euros ($36.9 million) a year earlier.