Ad description
A website for a holiday company, accessed on 20 October 2011, gave the price of return flights from London to Nice as £208.45. Further into the purchase journey a handling fee was added to the cost of the flights.
Issue
The complainant challenged whether the website was misleading because the initial price claim did not include the non-optional handling fee.
Response
Opodo Ltd said that the handling fee referred to in the complaint was applied to a relatively small proportion of bookings where the supplier levied a fee for bookings paid for with certain payment methods and where the processing cost incurred by Opodo was considerably higher than other transactions. They said that the fee sent to them by the airlines did not always include this payment method surcharge. They said that once they have established that a customer is paying by a method that incurs a surcharge they had to do a significant amount of reprocessing to re-price the fare. They said that this could result in situations where they had to contact the customer and advise them that the fare was no longer available and discuss alternatives. They said that all of this incurred additional processing costs for Opodo.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA noted Opodo stated that the fee referred to a surcharge levied by some airlines depending on the payment method used by the customer. We also noted that Opodo said they would sometimes have to reprocess the fare and contact the consumer to discuss next steps if the original fare no longer applied. However we understood that the handling fee referred to in the complaint was applied to every flight searched for with a particular airline, regardless of the payment method selected. We therefore considered that the handling fee was unavoidable and as such should have been included in the initial price claim. Because it was not, we concluded that the website was misleading.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules
3.1
3.1
Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.
and
3.3
3.3
Marketing communications must not mislead the consumer by omitting material information. They must not mislead by hiding material information or presenting it in an unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely manner.
Material information is information that the consumer needs to make informed decisions in relation to a product. Whether the omission or presentation of material information is likely to mislead the consumer depends on the context, the medium and, if the medium of the marketing communication is constrained by time or space, the measures that the marketer takes to make that information available to the consumer by other means.
(Misleading advertising) and
3.18
3.18
Quoted prices must include non-optional taxes, duties, fees and charges that apply to all or most buyers. However, VAT-exclusive prices may be given if all those to whom the price claim is clearly addressed pay no VAT or can recover VAT. Such VAT-exclusive prices must be accompanied by a prominent statement of the amount or rate of VAT payable.
(Prices).
Action
We told Opodo to include all non-optional fees in their initial price claims.
