INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM, TRAVEL AND HOSPITALITY LAW court may also, on the application of one of the parties, decline jurisdiction if the court first seised has jurisdiction over the actions in question and its law permits the consolidation thereof. (3) For the purposes of this Article, actions are deemed to be related where they are so closely connected that it is expedient to hear and determine them together to avoid the risk of irreconcilable judgments resulting from separate proceedings.” The Court considered that the Irish and English proceedings were not related and that they might never become related; this was due to the fact that the competition defence had not yet been pleaded by OTB in the Irish claim, and since it had applied to strike out those proceedings for want of prosecution, it might well never reach the point of filing any defence to them. The English proceedings will therefore proceed. As indicated, they raise interesting questions of competition law and of whether or not screen-scraping is a business practice which ought to be tolerated by the courts. 5. THE COMPETITION CLAIM In its action against Ryanair, OTB asserts that: OTB (like other online travel agents) competes with Ryanair both in providing flight booking services to consumers, and in offering to arrange ancillary travel services such as hotel accommodation. It also competes with other airlines, ancillary travel service providers, and traditional travel agents (as well as other online travel agents). It has, together with other online travel agents and price comparison websites, brought increased competition in these respects, providing real benefits to consumers: (1) Compared to booking different holiday components (for example, flight and hotel) with different providers: (a) OTB provides a “one-stop shop”; (b) As OTB enables customers to purchase multiple travel services in one transaction, it assumes a number of obligations under the Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 20187, including an obligation to ensure the proper performance of the package holiday (even though OTB is not the provider of the individual components), and to allow the consumer to transfer the package holiday to another person. 7 The UK iteration of the Package Travel Directive 2015/2302.
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