Vacation rental advertising can be rife with misleading advertising since private listings are not bound by regulations regarding misrepresentation, that travel agents are. Renters have to learn to read between the lines. ‘Great swimming in the lake’ can mean ‘Wade through 30 feet of trailing weed and mud to get to clear water for swimming’; ‘Rustic cottage’ may sound romantic but usually means ‘Indoor plumbing is dodgy and the spider on the bathroom wall has been dead for 10 years’. Owners can be selective with their descriptions too, so what is missing from the listing is as important as what is stated.

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@darren

happy valentine’s day!! haha.

anyway, two things with your post:

1) The Office of Fair Trading does not regulate advertising. In the UK it is the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which releases its weekly reports every Wednesday. The OFT exists to oversee the business practices of organisations, not their marketing.

2) Your headline is misleading and I wonder if it was written just to draw people in At this stage in the economic crisis there is no data to suggest that false advertising is on the increase.

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Doesn’t UK travel legislation regulate advertising? The Ontario Travel Act here in Canada does just that and would cover the example of false pricing you mention here.

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@heather – all UK advertising, regardless of the sector, is regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority.

@darren – we’ll agree to disagree over whether to use a headline for those reasons is damaging to a brand eh.

The ASA covers any kind of ‘push’ marketing – i.e. advertising (press, outdoor, online, direct, email etc). The OFT intervenes if, as you say, a company is suggesting in its literature or behaviour (including online) if its services or products are not what they appear, like prices of products. However, a discreet asterisk (*) next to a price (which leads to a page of additional costs), or the word ‘from’ is enough to get around regulators.

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Darren/Kevin etc.

In the UK no matter if it is an advert or misleading prices or anything else, just contact local trading standards, (trust me I have had a few calls from them to check out the rules, as even they can not keep on top of it). Our local trading standards are very helpful and having been on both ends of there service professional as well. After all isn’t that what we pay our taxes for?

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Each country is different but there needs to be some rules about honesty in pricing. In Australia, airlines must advertise the full price of the airfare incl taxes/surcharges, though even with this they can add luggage charges, credit card taxes and other optionals.

And on the green-washing topic, sadly companies that have genuine credentials are now being ignored as most people assume that nearly all make this claim and hence it doesn’t hold much value anymore.

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Darren,

Interesting post. I have a feeling many will attempt “misleading” advertising over the downturn.

The best advice is, as always, to read the small print and get the details before you sign anything.

Of course, improved standards from the ASA are necessary but essentially meaningless without proper enforcement – which is quite another thing and usually very time consuming.

This is where, I think, the internet is a very useful tool to consumers. The internet is useful not only in terms of alerting cosumers to specific instances of misleading advertising but also more general “tricks of the trade.” A small amount of research either online or offline (shopping at more than one travel agent or friends recomendations for example) can be equally useful tools in (a) exposing mislead ads and more importantly (b) finding reputable players in the first place.

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Darren

The thing to remember with the UK is holidays are done on most websites by screen scraping. We had a chat about how old travel tech is and that it does not work well with the web. So each night companies collect the data and post this information, so when you log in at 7 am it can already be 5-9 hours out, just getting worse though the day. To show you how it works we had a holiday to Malta we placed in our window one morning for 249.00, a customer came in at lunch time and the price was 229.00 so went to tell his wife and came back 15 minutes later to find the price was 299.00, all this in less than 3 hours, so think what 12 hours does.

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Oh! This old chestnut! We have had this one washing around the trade ever since Thommy Cook was a boy. It is, though, a valid argument nonetheless. Given that you have (potentially) the whole world chasing, say, 4 seats on a holiday, keeping up is quite hard. The view taken is that “one shall not take the you-know-what” You try as best you can to keep offers up to date and valid and on balance, the trade does manage this reasonably well (IMHO) No-one blatantly puts something silly in the window (or on the web) any more. Mind you, I have seen a holiday price change whilst clients have been debating which one to take…. !

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Just wanted to chime in two cents on “False Green Claims”. I’m not sure where you were going on this, since it was given such a short portion of your article. One hears quite a bit about “green washing’” nowadays. Some hotels are more green than others and there are many different green things that hotels can do to be more environmentally friendly. Even if they just switch to energy saving bulbs, recycle some of their trash, change linens only on request – that’s a good start as those three activities save energy, keep garbage out of landfills, and saves water. Hotels are getting greener all the time and realizing that they save money too!

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