MSE News: A guide to budget airline chutzpah

Gordon_the_Moron

Maybe buying a SkyEurope gift card wasn't such a good idea after all :money:

sdooley

no more skyeurope charges now they are bankrupt!

MrSmartprice

Martin is wrong, and I have posted this fact before. There is no need for legislative change. The legislation is already there. What is needed is simply effective enforcement.

I have just booked some Ryanair flights. Three of us to Dublin and back for 6p. Total, no extras, but that is on a promotional flight where check-in is free. We pay by Electron so the price was 'what it says on the tin'. No offence committed as the offered price was available.

Where the problem starts is if the headline price is, say, £5. But in this case you cannot avoid the online check-in price. So it cannot be obtained for £5 whatever you do. This is already an offence under s20 of the Consumer Protection Act 1987. But Ryanair et al are never prosecuted.

The only way forward is for a Trading Standards Department to prosecute the airlines who are engaging in this practice. So why don't they do so? As a former TSO I can shed some light on it.

Local authorities have limited legal budgets and only ever take cases they know they will win. Furthermore, they are also reluctant to take a case where they are likely to be appealed, even if it's 99% solid. The big corporations make no bones about the fact that they have huge legal 'clout' and TSDs are reluctant to take the risk. Losing cases also looks bad on the CV of the staff concerned.

As a consequence, companies like Tesco rarely get prosecuted, compared to the offences detected in their stores. I suspect no-one has the balls to take on Ryanair because it would probably end up in the Court of Appeal. There is little doubt that offences are being committed where charges are 100% unavoidable. The upside of any appeal would be that case law is stablished.

So Martin's next step is to persuade a TSD to prosecute an airline. Find out who are Ryanair's UK 'Home Authority' and lobby, cajole or shame them into action. I have suggested this before but the silence is deafening.......:shhh:

PolishBigSpender

MrSmartprice wrote: »

The only way forward is for a Trading Standards Department to prosecute the airlines who are engaging in this practice. So why don't they do so? As a former TSO I can shed some light on it.

Thank you for the insight, especially as you've written it without the drama and hype that usually accompanies such things.

Quick question for you - if Ryanair's internet servers are located outside the UK, would UK Trading Standards still have juristriction over them if they didn't actually advertise such fares on media physically located in the UK?