Mis-leading airline websites - Spanish CAA

[perkin]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7091950.stm

This story in the news this morning, sounds like good news for the consumer. Does anyone know which 13 airlines the UK Office of Fair Trading has taken action against?

[10secondsurvey]

There are only twelve to find, as everybody knows Ryanair will be on the list.

[old,not bold]

Apart from the unsurprising revelation that airline websites are very misleading as a matter of common policy, the article had some surprising information...

* A group of people from 15 countries could trawl 400 airline websites without ending up in the madhouse (well, perhaps they did...)

* There are 48 Belgian airlines (well, by inference, unless agents were included)

* Austria, the home of duplicity, had no websites which mislead, and has 20 airline websites

* the UK airlines, many of whose sites I have been trawling for the last week (hence the madhouse comment above) for fares next year on certain routes for a consultancy report, come out so badly. The sites are infuriating, cumbersome, badly designed, just dreadful, but mostly they show the full charges at an early stage reasonably well; the problem with most is the way they try to sneak in additional "services" on an opt-out basis. I am wondering who the 13 are, apart from the obvious candidates. I wonder if Ryanair is among them? They're Irish after all, but then again they advertise and sell mostly in UK.

BTW Full marks to Air Southwest who, under the hand of Malcolm Naylor, has always had a policy of simply quoting a fare with no add-ons whatsoever. In other words, of NOT separating out various elements of the airline's costs and charging separately for those under the false guise of "taxes" which, apart from the Government tax, they are not.

And as for Norwich Airport's scam of the £3.00 "Airport Improvement Levy", extorted from me last week under threat of denial of entry into departures and a future ban from the airport (both illegal), words fail me. I suspect it is a VAT and/or Corporation Tax avoidance scheme. The regulations about disclosure of the full amount payable for travel at the point of ticket sale probably make it illegal for that reason as well. I have asked HMRC and CAA to investigate Norwich Airport.

[10secondsurvey]

Couldn't agree more on the bad website design. The number of time I have given up trying to book a flight with an airline, and just gone with BA instead is staggering. BMI, KLM, SAS, United (UK), lufthansa are amongst some of the worst.

BMI, klm and United (UK) are especially bad.

For example, some sites reject payment, if your postcode is in the wrong format (i.e not French) some just will not work at all unless you use Inernet explorer (which I and many others no longer use). Building a website that only works on IE is just plain sloppy old school web design.

I often wonder if said airlines realise how many sales they actually lose before booking is completed? Sometime I really do give up, and go to a different airline, as it takes too long.

It is sloppy web design, and nothing else, and there really is no excuse for it.