Ad description
A website for Inspired Luxury Escapes, www.inspiredluxuryescapes.com, seen on 28 April 2022, featured a listing for the Cook’s Club hotel in Corfu. The listing showed two types of board available to be booked: “All Inclusive” and “Ultra All Inclusive from +£151pp”.
Issue
The complainant, who believed there was only one type of ‘all-inclusive’ offered at the hotel, challenged whether the ad was misleading.
Response
Broadway Travel Service (Wimbledon) Ltd t/a Inspired Luxury Escapes said that as a travel agent they acted purely as an intermediary in the transaction. They said the relevant terms and conditions applied based on the actual supplier’s description and pricing. They said, as they were offering multiple suppliers on their website the descriptions were based on the wording of those particular suppliers and pricing often differed between suppliers for the same properties based on various criteria.
They said that in this instance they had two suppliers who had worded the description differently, which was at the supplier’s discretion and something they said was a frequent occurrence. They said that since being informed of the complaint, they had been in contact with the supplier whose description referred to an ‘Ultra All Inclusive’ option, and this description had now been amended on the website to ‘All Inclusive’.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA considered that Inspired Luxury Escapes were responsible for the contents of their website.
We noted that the ad did not provide any information to explain to consumers what each board type included. We considered that, in the absence of that information, consumers were likely to understand that the “Ultra All Inclusive” booking option offered better accommodation or more comprehensive services or facilities than the “All Inclusive” option.
Because consumers were likely to interpret the ad to mean there was a material difference in the level of accommodation or services/facilities on offer between the two board options, and we had not seen evidence that this was the case, the ad was likely to mislead.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 3.1 Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so. (Misleading advertising) and 3.7 3.7 Before distributing or submitting a marketing communication for publication, marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove claims that consumers are likely to regard as objective and that are capable of objective substantiation. The ASA may regard claims as misleading in the absence of adequate substantiation. (Substantiation).
Action
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Broadway Travel (Wimbledon) Ltd t/a Inspired Luxury Escapes to ensure they included material information about different board types in their ads in future and to ensure they held adequate substantiation.
