Minister forces airlines to reveal full cost of air fares in promotions

From March 1st advertisements for Ryanair flights to London for £9 will become a thing of the past.

Rules introduced by the Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Mr Tom Kitt, mean that, from that date, advertisements for airline tickets will have to include information on the full cost and availability of the fare on offer. On top of the unlikely sounding £9, the airline will have to add all the extra charges, bringing that £9 price to just over £34.

It all sounds highly transparent and for that reason it is welcome but, oddly enough, given the experience in other product categories, the thorny subject of the type-size of this small print has been ignored.

Airlines will have to advertise the total price but it is unclear how prominently that information will have to be displayed. The Minister's order states: "There is an option of giving an itemised breakdown in advertisements of the total price payable". So what is to stop an airline from, for example, putting that £9 seat price in much larger type than the total price of £34? Unless the Minister intends issuing some small print of his own, there would seem to be none.

A look at what is currently happening with any advertising involving credit terms should have alerted the Minister's office to the potential problem. The new Daewoo press advertisement is a case in point. The line that the Lanos "is yours for £34.95 per week" is followed by the inevitable asterisk. To conform with the regulation there is a line spelling out the terms of the credit details. However, those terms are in tiny print - half the size of the £34.95.

Daewoo is not the only culprit. It's common advertising practice with other car companies and with retailers, particularly electrical retailers, that offer credit plans. Last year the main plank of Eircom's consumer advertising was that a phone call cost 1p per minute. Try reading the very small print and you would see that there was really no such thing as a 1p a minute rate. The price of the call worked out at that figure only if you stayed on the line for a certain period of time. The minimum charge was, in fact, about 11p.

During the Eircom share offer, the glossy television ads conformed to the regulations by including terms and conditions printed on screen. However, the size of the type and speed at which it whizzed across the screen made it impossible to read.

Car advertising, is, according to Mr Dermott Jewell of the Consumers' Association of Ireland, the next area to be tackled. At its most recent meeting, the BEUC, the European consumers' association, focused on the lack of transparency in car advertising. The Irish consumers' association plans to lobby for legislation to take all extra charges out of the small print and put them into the main advertised price.

The Minister's action does, yet again, emphasise the powerlessness of the advertising industry's own regulatory body, the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland. In response to consumer complaints, it has sanctioned several airlines in the past for their advertising to little effect, prompting the question of why the industry continues to have such a toothless regulatory body.