Re: Ryanair criticised for tightening the screws again
From The Independent today:
Britain's top business regulator has accused Europe's biggest airline, Ryanair, of "almost taunting" passengers in a strongly worded attack on its charges.
John Fingleton, the chief executive of the Office of Fair Trading, described Ryanair's levying of fees for paying by card online as "puerile" and "almost childish", adding the carrier was only operating within "the narrow letter of the law".
Ryanair advertises taxes and other fees upfront but only mentions charges for paying by plastic at the end of booking on the grounds that customers could escape the fee by using an obscure prepaid card.
The no-frills carrier – along with other airlines and ticketing agencies – is being investigated by the OFT over online pricing and advertising. Of particular concern is "drip-pricing" where shoppers only discover the full cost of a service late in the booking process, which makes it difficult to shop around.
In a rare and exclusive interview, his first for 18 months, Mr Fingleton, whose organisation has previously clashed with Ryanair, criticised the airline's "funny game".
"Ryanair has this funny game where they have found some low frequency payment mechanism and say: 'Well, because you can pay with that [the charge is optional]'," he said. "It's almost like taunting consumers and pointing out: 'Oh well, we know this is completely outside the spirit of the law, but we think it's within the narrow letter of the law'."
Mr Fingleton – whose criticism elicited an angry response from Ryanair – hopes that ironing out problems on airline websites will set standards for online shopping, which is forecast to account for half of retail sales by 2020.
Under consumer law, businesses must advertise all compulsory charges. At the payment stage online, Ryanair levies a £5 debit or credit card charge per passenger, per journey, although the cost to the company is only about 30p per payment, according to the card industry. The charges can add £40 to the cost of a return trip for a family of four – several times the airline's cheapest advertised fares.
From last month, payments by Electron card that had previously been free began to attract the fee and Ryanair switched its free option to MasterCard pre-pay. Mr Fingleton suggested that Ryanair had found "some low frequency payment mechanism" to get round the rules.
He said: "It's almost like taunting consumers and pointing out: 'Oh well, we know this is completely outside the spirit of the law, but we think it's within the narrow letter of the law'.
"On some level, it's quite puerile, it's almost childish. And you sort of smile, and newspapers like yours or BBC Radio 4's Moneybox do a good job in pointing this out to consumers. This is just playing silly games at the margins of it all and we might or might not go running after something like that."
The automatic addition of insurance to flights by airlines, including Ryanair, unless customers opted out, was, he said, another legal "grey area". But public anger about such charges might prove to be more effective than regulatory action, he said. "It would be silly to go after something like that every time because they would quickly change it to something else, and it's trying to establish a general principle that what's not optional is not in there. Consumer anger and frustration, and an element of transparency, often changes these things much quicker than legal action."