Passengers who tried to ban Ryanair from claiming to be Europe’s number one airline after it cancelled thousands of flights last autumn have had their complaint turned down by the advertising watchdog.
The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that although the airline might not be passengers’ personal number one European carrier, it was certainly the largest, based on passenger numbers.
Thirteen people had lodged complaints with the ASA about three Ryanair ads on TV, radio and on the London Underground that appeared between September 26 and October 4 2017, all stating that Ryanair was ‘Europe’s number one airline’.
The complainants challenged whether this claim was misleading as Ryanair cancelled almost 645,000 flights last year.
In its defence, Ryanair said ‘Europe’s number one Airline’ was a statement of fact, based on the most recent International Air Transport Association World Air Transport Statistics 2017 report for air travel in 2016, which found that Ryanair was the world’s largest airline for international flights and Europe’s largest airline for international and domestic flights combined.
It said its spate of flight cancellations last autumn ‘did not materially alter the fact’. The cancellations affected fewer than 0.5% of its 129 million customers in 2017.
Further, its October 2017 traffic grew by 8% to 11.8 million customers, even when the flight cancellations were included.
Rejecting claims that the Ryanair ads were misleading, the ASA said consumers were likely to understand the claim ‘Europe’s number one airline’ in each ad to mean that over a reasonable period before the ads were produced Ryanair had carried more passengers than any other European airline.
"While we acknowledged some of the complainants’ views of Ryanair were that it was not their personal number one airline due to the recent flight cancellations, we considered they would nevertheless still interpret the claim to be an objective statement about the number of passengers who had travelled on Ryanair flights compared to all other European airlines," it said.
