On the Beach misled consumers with price saving claim

On the Beach was found to have made misleading claims about the number of customers who saved money booking holidays in a recent poster campaign after it was spotted by the chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Statistics.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) was asked to investigate the claims made on a poster in January 2018, in which On the Beach claimed that ‘92% of our customers say they saved money booking their holiday with us’.

Smaller text at the bottom of the poster qualified that the claim was based on a survey of 37,439 customers between July 14 2016 and August 30 2017.

However, during its investigation, the ASA found that 300,000 customers had actually been asked to participate in the survey, but only 37,439 had responded. "We considered that it was likely that a proportion of the consumers who did not respond to the survey had not or were not aware if they had saved money when booking their holiday through On The Beach," it said. "We therefore considered that the claim in the ad was misleading because the percentage of the total number of consumers surveyed who had saved money was likely to be much lower than the 92% stated in the ad."

The ASA also found fault with the methodology of the survey, which it said was not sufficiently robust. Customers were aksed how much money they had considered they had saved and were promoted to choose from a list, starting with: "I didn’t save anything", and at the top of the range: "Saved over £500".

"The survey did not require consumers to provide any specific information about the basis of their savings, for example, they did not have to state if the money they saved was against exactly the same holiday or how much it had been sold at by a different provider," said the ASA.

"Further, we considered that the savings question: "When you booked with On the Beach recently, how much money would you say you saved by booking with us?" was phrased in a leading manner, and that could have led survey respondents to assume that they had saved money when they perhaps did not know.

"We considered that the methodology used to conduct the survey was not robust as it did not require consumers to provide any detail of the saving they made and the survey was insufficiently detailed to substantiate a savings claim. We therefore concluded that the ad was misleading and in breach of the Code."

On the Beach has been told not to repeat the ad in its current form. "We told On The Beach to ensure that in the future they held adequate evidence to substantiate saving claims," added the ASA.