CAPTCHA
daz - I find myself taking a view similiar to yours, namely having once been a big fan of FR but now thoroughly put off with the introduction of CAPTCHA. I notice however, that the FR website seems to have been slightly changed recently, so that one gets to see 10 one-way prices rather than just 4, before one has to re-enter a CAPTCHA code - presumably because someone realised bookings were down.
Assuming FR have some degree of control over the management of their website and haven't completely outsourced it (job ads for website developers on the FR website indicate they retain a significant degree of control), it would seem *very* likely that they have a large amount of information as to how people interact with the FR website. In particular, the cookies that are sent from bookryanair.com to your PC should be providing plenty of information to Dublin. Any website developer with even the smallest degree of competence should be able to do some sort of analysis on customer behaviour and track what happens when new features are introduced.
The thing that puzzles me, is that looking round the web, FR seem to have trialled this in one or 2 countries earlier this year - Spain seems to be mentioned regularly - but I don't know if this is true or not. If CAPTCHA *was* trialled for one or two countries, presumably someone in Dublin would have had a good look through the numbers to see what effect it had on bookings before rolling it out to the rest of Europe. Either this trial was only very small scale, or the analysis was done poorly, or adding CAPTCHA actually has little effect on bookings but just dissuades visitors who have no intention of buying anyway - anyone, particularly those living in Spain, able to comment on this ?
Last edited by davidjohnson6; 10th Dec 2011 at 15:42.