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Ryanair and Air Malta have just announced that as of today, you will be able to buy Air Malta flights from the Ryanair website.

As a result, the Ryanair.com website will now offer flights on 21 new routes from Malta to cities in (amongst many others) Austria, Czechia, Israel, Morocco, Russia, Switzerland, Tunisia and Ukraine.

Start of a new Ryanair strategy?

It seems so. In Ryanair’s own words, this partnership is its latest enhancement it attempts to become the ‘Amazon of travel.’ Therefore, expect to see more and more third party flights being offered on Ryanair.com.

Interestingly, Ryanair itself already offers 53 routes to/from Malta.

The strategy is not entirely new. As things stand, the occasional flight with Air Europa is offered on the Ryanair.com website. There may also be one or two others I haven’t yet stumbled across.

Expect more in the future, too.

Beware though… you could be losing cashback!

While the hope is that this development leads to Ryanair offering a wider choice of flight when you’re (resorting to) using them, there’s an obvious issue. You will get zero cashback on flights booked via Ryanair, but you can get cashback on Air Malta flights booked via airmalta.com, if you first go via TopCashback.

What’s in this for Ryanair?

Commission on each flight sold, presumably. As per the ‘Amazon of travel’ strategy.

That said, I’m also a little unsure how Ryanair’s search algorithm will work where it’s offering competing flights itself. As noted above, Ryanair offers a multitude of routes to/from Malta, and you would imagine it would have to be on a fairly hefty commission from Air Malta for it to be better off with people booking the Air Malta option rather than the Ryanair one.