Ryanair systems upgrade will halt bookings

The timing is also bad for the airline, with January to February being the key time for holiday bookings, analyst Robin Goad wrote on competitive intelligence website Hitwise UK.

“Not only is this a long time for a website to shut down, but the timing seems very strange. ... We are currently at the peak time of year for online flight bookings - even if we are approaching the end of the spike.”

A blogger, known as GSM763 wrote on aviation interest site Airliners.net: “Very drastic, this will probably cost Ryanair a fortune. Does the website really have to close for a new booking system?” Blogger Pe@rson added: “About 98% of [Ryanair’s] bookings are made on its website. All distributed points combined, [it] has on average around 135,000 new bookings per day. So, over three days that's around 407,000 potential bookings.”

But Bainbridge at Travel UCD said a system change could have to take place online, in order to avoid confusion as the airline manually loaded a raft of old data onto the new software.

Blogger TOLtommy agreed. “It's actually rather proactive to do it this way. Far too often airlines try to migrate booking systems with disastrous results because they want to keep the systems up during the migration. As a result, the migration doesn't go smoothly, taking much longer than planned, and frustrating customers for a much longer period. I would anticipate a big sale to announce that the site is up and running again.”.

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