deliberately breached its obligations to a particular class of consumer in furtherance of its own business strategy. According to OTB, Ryanair has unjustifably sought to exploit the circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic in order to exert fnancial pressure on OTB, and reduce its efectiveness as a competitor, by withholding refunds sought by OTB, where Ryanair has cancelled those customers’ fights. OTB has therefore, in accordance with its legal obligations as an organiser of package holidays itself been forced to fund refunds to its customers, totalling £48.7 million to date of issue. Of those sums, OTB has been able to recover approximately £43.5 million, primarily through the use of the chargeback facility of the credit cards it uses to book its customers’ fights. It alleges that Ryanair has sought to prevent such chargebacks, created further unnecessary obstacles to providing refunds, and generally refused constructively to engage with OTB’s concerted attempts to agree a more collaborative arrangement. Ryanair has sought to justify such practices by claiming that they are necessary to protect consumers, because online travel agents do not promptly pass on refunds from Ryanair to their customers. This, according to OTB, is untrue, at least as far as it is concerned. Ryanair’s true motive for this practice, so it is said, is to weaken OTB including through fnancial pressure and negative publicity, and – by requiring OTB customers to apply directly to Ryanair for refunds – to gather data by which it can improve its ability to prevent OTB from making bookings for OTB customers, and/or degrade those customers’ experiences after such bookings are successfully made. In short, OTB’s case is that Ryanair has used the circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic to fuel its smear campaign against OTB, and to exacerbate that smear campaign by seeking to prevent OTB from
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