Not the best of starts for Ryanair and new accommodation white label provider HotelsCombined, with the metasearch site moving quickly to clarify comments by Michael O'Leary.
The partnership was first noticed, but only officially announced yesterday, when Ryanair unveiled Isango as its new white label provider for tours and activities, with previous accommodation provider Booking.com disappearing from the site in favour of HotelsCombined.
With remarkable coincidence, Booking.com emerged just a few days later as the new accommodation provider for rival carrier EasyJet.
At a press conference in London this week to unveil the new RyanairHotels microsite, Ryanair CEO O'Leary was reported to have said HotelsCombined will use "screen-scraping methods" to obtain hotel inventory and prices.
While this may appear slightly ironic to many given Ryanair has spent the best part of the past few years trying to crack down on metasearch sites scraping its own fares and availability, including the launch of a CAPTCHA system to try and halt the practice, officials and the main man himself are perhaps just a little bit confused on the finer points of screen-scraping.
HotelsCombined director of business development Yury Glikin insists the metasearch engine does not scrape any hotel websites or online travel agencies to get the deals it will be providing to Ryanair.
"We do not do any scraping, all XML," he says via email. "Not sure why that comment is there, we definitely do not scrape."
Of course, it wouldn't be beyond O'Leary and his canny PR team to be simply using the moment to raise the wider issue of screen scraping again - but by inadvertently or otherwise (falsely) singling out its new partner as a screen-scraper.