A website purporting to be from Kenya Airways has been banned by the advertising watchdog.
The Advertising Standards Authority stepped in after receiving complaint about www.kenyaairway.co.uk in November.
Despite using the airline’s tagline as being the “pride of Africa,” small print at the bottom of the page stated: “We are UK based authorized dealers for Kenya Airways.
“Our website should not be considered a representation of the airline. It is to provide flight options and promote sales worldwide.”
The complainant challenged whether the website misleadingly implied that it was the official site of Kenya Airways.
The ASA upheld the compliant after kenyaairway.co.uk failed to respond to its enquiries.
In a ruling published today, the ASA said: “The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told kenyaairway.co.uk to ensure that their website did not misleadingly imply that it was the official website of Kenya Airways.”
The ASA noted that the website featured an image “very similar” to the official Kenya Airways logo at the top of every page.
Directly underneath the logo was the tagline “the Pride of Africa”, which was the official tagline of Kenya Airways.
The tagline was positioned in the same manner as it was positioned on the official Kenya Airways website.
The website also featured similar colours and branding to the official Kenya Airways website and an image of a Kenya Airways aircraft.
“Furthermore, the home page stated ‘About Kenya Airways’ followed by information about the airline,” the ASA found.
“We considered that consumers were likely to understand, from the logo, tagline, branding and image of the Kenya Airways plane, as well as the ‘About Kenya Airways’ section, that the website was the official website of Kenya Airways,” the ASA said.
“While we acknowledged that there was small print at the bottom of the home page which stated “We are UK based authorized dealers for Kenya Airways. Our website should not be considered a representation of the airline. It is to provide flight options and promote sales worldwide”, we considered that the text was likely to be overlooked by consumers and was not sufficient to counter the overall impression that the website was the official website of Kenya Airways.
“For those reasons, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead consumers.”