Ryanair’s no frills developer experience

This is the story of how my text file became a key developer resource for Europes’s largest airline.

This week ten years ago I was in Skibbereen, Co. Westcork for the inaugural National Digital Week, a four day event organised by Ludgate, Ireland’s first rural digital hub. Amongst the lineup of speakers was Colin O’Brien, Software QA & Test Manager with Ryanair whose talk outlined the airline’s digital journey and their ambitions to be a technology company with an airline attached if memory serves.

While the talk was quite interesting in itsself it was one slide in particular that caught my attention, it read …

api.ryanair.com

… to which Colin announced Ryanair’s new ‘Open API’ .

The reason this caught my attention was that Ryanair had a history of being incredible litigious towards those who accessed or made use of their flight or fare data.  In their 2011 Annual Report, the company noted that it was involved in legal proceedings in Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, all of theses cases centered around screen-scraping, a legally dubious process which is usually the only way to gain access to data when it is not provided in a structured format, such as, an API. However it was not just use of it’s data that Ryanair took issue with, bizarrely their Terms of Use forbid anyone from even linking to their website without prior consent, yes I would have to have written consent to do this -> ryanair.com.

In light of their history offering an API seemed like a complete about-turn, so that evening I went to check out the API only to be presented with a blank page, so I sent Colin a message…

Now I acknowledge that there is no universally accepted definition of the term “Open API“, but an API with no documentation that you have pitch your ideas to the vendor for approval would probably not be considered open in any sense of the term.

I didn’t follow up with a proposal as I didn’t have any ideas, unless I was accessing an API for a work project any of the API’s I had used were while doing things that were in some way inspired by looking at the capabilities of the API itself, this was the era of mashups after all.

That said I was curious about what data was available so I opened ryanair.com and started logging the requests, before long had gathered the endpoints and parameters required to obtain data for Ryanair’s routes, schedules and discounts as well as the airports they served.

Not knowing what else to do with this information I pasted it into a gist and left it at that.

I forgot about this until other developers searching for documentation on Ryanair’s API  started commenting on it, I began updating the file with new endpoints that others had found, but mostly it was just discussion.

Bizarrely people also contacted me directly asking for permission to use the airline’s API !

As it happened the day after I posted this tweet Colin got back in touch to tell me to check out developer.ryanair.com for details on their API.

It turned out that Ryanair had a flashy new portal which…

…provides access to our products and services, through a single, centralized portal; allowing partners and entrepreneurs to create new economies on top of Ryanair’s new and existing products and services.

I signed up and waited to gain access, it turns out I wasn’t the only one waiting as soon enough the comments on the gist was full others asking if anyone had been approved.

I heard nothing until the following February when to my surprise I received a license agreement with terms and conditions enclosed which I was requested to sign in order to access the API, I wasn’t the only one surprised by this.

Every now and then I wake up to notifications of new comments, mostly developers looking for help or venting their frustration, but I stopped trying to keep the document updated years ago.

As well as all the discussion the Gist has 84 stars and 21 forks, now you might be thinking is minuscule but is actually quite impressive when you consider that this is probably my only gist with > 0 stars or forks 🙂

In that past decade the subdomains api.ryanair.com and developer.ryanair.com have both come and gone, Ryanair have moved their API to their main domain (ryanair.com/api/) while their developer portal seems to have been discontinued sometime around 2020.

So here we are in 2025 and my text file is still the top result you search for Ryanair API or Ryanair developer, truly a no frills developer experience.

PS if you happen to be looking to access Ryanair’s API I suggest you check out ryanair-py by Ciarán Ó hAoláin and while you are there be sure to check out the issues page where at time of writing the top issue is some confused developer trying to figure out it he is allowed to use the API or not !