Why Low-Cost Carriers Are Missing from Every Travel API

There's a dirty secret in travel tech: the airlines that carry the most passengers in Europe are completely invisible to every travel API on the market.

Ryanair carried 184 million passengers in 2024. Wizz Air: 80 million. EasyJet: 100 million. Combined, that's more than Lufthansa Group, Air France-KLM, and IAG put together.

And yet, if you're building a travel app — or an AI agent, or a corporate booking tool — you can't access any of them through an API. Not Amadeus. Not Sabre. Not Travelport. Not Duffel. Not Kiwi (not reliably, anyway).

It's Not a Bug. It's Their Business Model.

Traditional airlines pay GDS platforms $4–8 per booking segment to distribute their inventory. For a full-service carrier selling £400 tickets, that's a rounding error. For Ryanair selling £19 seats, it's the entire profit margin.

LCCs make money on ancillaries: baggage, seat selection, priority boarding, car rentals. They need the customer on their website, in their funnel, seeing their upsells. A GDS booking strips all of that away.

So they opted out. Ryanair famously sued Booking.com for screen-scraping. Wizz Air sends cease-and-desist letters to aggregators. EasyJet has a partner API, but it's invite-only and restricted to a handful of large OTAs.

What This Means for Developers

If you're building on Amadeus, Duffel, or any GDS-based API, your search results are structurally incomplete. You're showing your users a curated slice of the market — and it's the expensive slice.

The London–Barcelona route is a perfect example. British Airways via Amadeus: £180. Ryanair direct: £29. Your API literally cannot see the cheapest option.

For corporate travel tools, this is embarrassing. For AI agents claiming to "find the best deal," it's misleading. For fintechs offering travel perks to cardholders, it's leaving money on the table.

The Scraping Trap

The obvious solution is screen-scraping. And yes — it works. For about three weeks.

LCCs invest heavily in anti-bot technology. Ryanair uses Perimeter X. Wizz Air rotates their DOM structure weekly. EasyJet deploys aggressive rate limiting. Every scraper is in a constant arms race against airlines that have every legal and technical incentive to shut them down.

Kiwi.com built their business on aggregation, including LCCs. Their LCC results are frequently stale, prices don't match at checkout, and booking failures are common. It's the best the industry has — and it's not reliable enough for API-grade integration.

The Human-in-the-Loop Approach

At RunRelay, we took a different approach. Instead of trying to automate what airlines actively prevent from being automated, we built a hybrid system:

• GDS flights — searched and booked via API (Amadeus), fully automated
• LCC flights — searched via API where possible, booked by trained human agents who complete the booking on the airline's website within minutes
• One API — your integration doesn't change. You send a search request, get results from both GDS and LCC, and book through the same endpoint

The result: full market coverage. Your users see Ryanair next to Lufthansa. The £29 flight shows up alongside the £180 one. And when they book, it just works.

Why Now?

Two things changed in 2025 that make this problem urgent:

1. AI agents are going mainstream. Every bank, every fintech, every lifestyle app wants to offer "AI-powered travel." But if your AI can only see 67% of flights, you're shipping a broken product on day one.

2. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is connecting AI to APIs. Travel is one of the first verticals where AI agents need to execute, not just search. And execution requires complete inventory. Half the market isn't good enough.

The Bottom Line

LCCs aren't going to open their APIs. Their business model depends on controlling the customer relationship. The scraping approach is a dead end for production-grade systems.

The only sustainable solution is human-in-the-loop execution: treat LCC booking as a service, not a technical problem. That's what RunRelay does.

If you're building a travel product and hitting this wall, check out our API. One integration. Full coverage. No scraping.