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Travelzoo misled customers over Ibiza short break
Travelzoo has been told off by advertising watchdogs for a misleading advert.
The travel deal website was advertising three-night breaks in Ibiza for £99, but in fact the holiday meant spending two of the three nights travelling to and from the island.
A customer complained after buying the holiday and discovering that flight times were such that he arrived at Ibiza airport at 1.35 am on the first night and departed at 1.45 am on the third night.
After an investigation, the Advertising Standards Authority said: "We considered that some of the flight times, including those of the complainant, did not accord with consumer expectations of a three-day holiday because passengers on those flights only had one full night at the hotel.
"We therefore concluded that the claims "this three-night Balearic break" and "three nights at the Tropical Hotel" had not been substantiated and were misleading."
It told Travelzoo the ad must not appear again in its current form and to ensure that in future ads they did not mislead consumers about the length of the holidays.
A spokesman for Travelzoo said: "This is the first time since we started publishing deals in the UK in 2005 that we have had this sort of ruling against us from the ASA and we take it very seriously.
"We pride ourselves on the fact that we research, test and evaluate over 120,000 deals a year. On this occasion one of the variations of the multiple departure and return flight options meant that this particular booking did not have three full nights in a hotel as the customer arrived after and departed just after midnight on the first and last nights.
"The majority of the flight times that we tested for this Ibiza deal had three full nights in the hotel in Ibiza and we will work hard to ensure that this sort of one-off anomaly does not happen again."
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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