A year is a long time in travel as well as politics - especially for Ryanair which has agreed today to publish its its fares on the Kayak metasearch engine.
The surprise move comes not so long after the low-cost airline's widely publicised anti-screen scraping stance against online travel agencies, price comparison and metasearch sites.
The deal will see Ryanair fares, availability and schedule information included on the Kayak site.
In the summer of 2008, Ryanair famously published a list of websites around Europe it said were scraping its website to obtain fares and schedules.
It emerged that Ryanair was clamping down on the scraping activity because of major load pressures on its site, rather than the stated reason that it wanted consumers to book direct.
Two of the leading metasearch sites in the UK, TravelSupermarket and Skyscanner, had contrasting fortunes as a result of Ryanair's action at the time - Skyscanner kept its ability to include Ryanair fares while TravelSupermarket was cut out.
NB: TravelSupermarket says it now shows Ryanair fares on its site.
Ryanair was understood at the time to be working with a number of technology providers (including Microsoft) to put in sophisticated firewalls to ease to load to the site from scrapers.
The about-face (and a very public one at that) marks a major move by Kayak in the European marketplace after a number of years failing to challenge TravelSupermarket, Skyscanner and price comparison site Cheapflights.
Officials in its European division were charged with securing a deal with Kayak almost two years ago, despite the airline's stated policy of not working with metasearch engines.
For Ryanair the move is also a significant one.
The airline has steadfastly refused to work with intermediaries since its inception as a web-based booking airline, with much of its chief executive Michael O'Leary's ire aimed at traditional offline retail travel agents - inevitably angering almost the entire travel trade community in the UK.
The move to work with Kayak signifies either that the airline has established new or improved XML systems from its website or has chosen to partner with the US-based engine purely for commercial reasons.
It also recently started working with Travelzoo's Fly.com metasearch engine with content.
Skyscanner was one of the only sites that wasn't blocked by Ryanair at the height of the screen scraping row - a decision Skyscanner said at the time was due to the less-aggressive way from a caching perspective that it was accessing the fares from the airline's site.
Ryanair now says:
"Ryanair has never had a problem with honest cost comparison sites (ie those that simply display accurate information without loading on their own charges) but continues to work to prevent underhand practices at some sites where prices are inflated with the addition of ‘commission’ or ‘handling fees’ without the passenger being made aware of the true cost (ie the cost of the flight if they left that site and booked directly on Ryanair.com). Any true, cost comparison only, site can sign up to a licensing agreement with Ryanair to display our information."
Kayak has also announced it is moving its holidays search tool on the site out of beta for a full launch. The channel is currently support by trips from the likes of Thomas Cook, Virgin Holidays and On The Beach.
Today's outpouring of PR also includes news that Lastminute.com is streaming hotel content into Kayak's accommodation engine.