Anyone have experience of how online payment systems work?

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Really odd one;

Ryanair tickets, I buy them for people from their website. For many years I used our company Amex (charge card) for this, a week ago the system rejected that, so I used our company Capital One Visa (credit card) for it and that worked. Then on Friday they both stopped working, tried our company Visa Debit card and that doesn't work either, used my personal Visa debit card and it went through straight away. This is still going on (book a 3 to 4 tickets a day on average).

Anyone have any idea as to why that should be?

The company cards have my personal name on them and that's what goes in the cardholder box, also has the company name. Ryanair are more than happy to have travel agents booking their flights and if they are fed up with paying Amex and Visa credit card fees they should still take the company Visa Debit card.

Any ideas?

 

[cupid_stunt]

Ryanair - that's where you're going wrong.

Any problems with any other airlines?

 

[Saul Goodman]

Ryanair are more than happy to have travel agents booking their flights

I don't think that's actually the case, unless you're a Ryanair partnered travel agent.. I'm pretty sure Ryanair has been trying for years to prevent unauthorised resellers from obtaining tickets. It seems like they may have upped their game.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Ryanair - that's where you're going wrong.

Any problems with any other airlines?

No problems with any other airlines.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

I don't think that's actually the case, unless you're a Ryanair partnered travel agent.. I'm pretty sure Ryanair has been trying for years to prevent unauthorised resellers from obtaining tickets. It seems like they may have upped their game.

We are a partner, as well as booking via their website I can book in the same system I book all IATA airlines with (but must pay via card rather than IATA as I do for say, BA). Ryanair are more than happy to be dealing with us. What they don't like are websites that use screen scraping.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Availability London to Rome tomorrow, first five are Ryanair, last one is BA:






They have to pay to have their content shown in that system and are happy to do so. Guess they pay a fuck-ton less than BA etc. does.

 

[JimW]

Has your accountant been driving a new car recently?

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Oh, and if I make a change to an existing booking that I had to buy with my personal card, say add baggage etc., I can use the Amex, Capital One or Visa Debit and they go through.

 

[HeAthen]

Do you get any specific error message when you try to pay?

I've integrated payment gateways on large websites for getting on for 20yrs so know how they work and it's definitely odd that you can use the cards for add ons but not the actual flights. Suggests one of two things, either Ryanair are blocking the order before it send payment requests to their payment provider or they have some strange fraud filters set up which is filtering out those types of transactions.

Best bet would be to get in touch with Ryanair (yes, I know that's likely to be a painful process).

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

We had got in touch with Ryanair who could only advise to clear cookies etc.

Done one today and it took my Amex card.

Oddest bit was it wouldn't take the company debit card but would take my personal debit card. In the box where you put the cardholder name it is my name on both, never the company name.


Really cannot fathom why this should have been a thing, but hopefully resolved, bit of a pain transferring money to my personal account after each booking, even more of a pain when I did a group in the week for >£7000, oddly enough I don't have that in my personal account...

 

[moochedit]

I remember a few years back at my work we had an issue with card payments failing and it was because the providers anti-fraud system regarded more than x number of transactions from the same ip address within a certain time period as suspicious and started blocking them. They had to "whitelist" our ip address (which was static) to solve the problem. No idea if that is what is happenning here though or how easy it would be to ask a ryanair helpdesk person about it.