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Opodo breached advertising code
Online travel agent Opodo has been told off by watchdogs for breaching the advertising code.
The Advertising Standards Authority carried out an investigation after a complaint from a customer who saw an advert for cheap flights from London to Mumbai.
The customer challenged whether the advert was misleading because the prices displayed included a pre-applied discount that was only available for travellers paying via Entropay, a pre-paid visa card.
The ASA upheld the complaint and said it believed the number of consumers with an existing Entropay account was likely to be small.
"And of those who did have an account, the proportion who would already have funds pre-loaded onto the card was in turn likely to be small," it explained.
"Therefore, the average consumer was unlikely to be able to purchase a flight at a stated Entropay price without incurring the additional cost of loading funds onto the card."
It said because the omission of the amount of the Entropay fees was likely to mislead consumers, and because in some instances the existence of those fees meant that the claim ‘Cheapest method’ was likely to mislead, the ad breached the Code."
Opodo was told the ad must not appear again in its current form and that it could not claim that the Entropay payment method was the cheapest if that was not the case.
It was also told to ensure that it did not omit material information relating to fees associated with the Entropay payment method from future ads.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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