A TRAVEL agent has blasted Ryanair's decision to cancel bookings not made through its own website from Monday as "scandalous".

The budget airline wants to force people to use its own site - and that could leave 1,000 people a day turning up at airports only to find they have no flight.

Ryanair operates flights to 14 destinations from Bournemouth airport, and on Monday it has departures to Barcelona, Dublin, Glasgow, Malaga and Murcia.

Robert Readman from Select World Travel in Canford Cliffs, Poole, said: "It's totally scandalous.

"Ryanair are saying it's illegal to use one of these websites. But if you buy discounted Cornflakes from a greengrocer, that's not illegal.

"It's going to affect a lot of people - they're going to arrive and find they have no flights.

"It won't affect us because we make our bookings through Ryanair's website."

Passengers returning to the UK could potentially be stranded in Europe.

Ryanair said it is targeting price comparison websites that "illegally" use so-called screen scraping technology to match up their booking tools with the airline's own website.

A spokesman for the company said: "We will speed up passenger processing times as well as ensuring that Ryanair passengers are not paying unnecessary handling charges or higher fares."

David Skillicorn, managing director of Bournemouth-based Palmair said: "It's a very brave man who in the most dreadful year in the airline industry's history seeks to a exclude a source of business.

"Ryanair has a very vocal policy towards travel agents and has over the last 24 hours described travel agents in fairly unusual terms but, like it or not, there are a lot of people who trust travel agents to make judgements on their behalf.

"The boss of Ryanair, Michael O'Leary, has said he has 30 planes too many. If he had a different approach, perhaps he would not be in the trouble his firm appears to be in."

The Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) said Ryanair was being "foolish" and "unreasonable. Around 0.5 per cent of bookings will be affected.