Ryanair insists it has complied with an Office of Fair Trading instruction to show inclusive prices after shutting its booking website for two days last weekend.
The site returned to taking bookings a day ahead of schedule on Monday. But the fares displayed on the page that allows customers to select a flight after entering airports and travel dates still did not include taxes and charges.
That prompted ABTA to accuse Ryanair of failing to meet the OFT’s requirements. “Ryanair has fobbed off the OFT for more than a year with the excuse it could not show clear prices,” said ABTA head of legal services Simon Bunce. “Clearly they still don’t have the technology or just don’t care.”
However, by Wednesday the site appeared closer to compliance, with Ryanair saying the delay had been due to technical problems.
The carrier blamed a traffic surge after it announced the sale of one million seats at 1p each including tax. At one point fewer than one in 5,000 bookings were being completed, it said.
A Ryanair spokeswoman insisted: “The website is fully tax inclusive. But we expect bedding down problems to continue until the end of the week.”
An inclusive fare now appears in a box on the right of the page once a flight is selected, with a note at the top of the page to explain this.
The OFT instructed all airlines to display prices inclusive of non-optional charges, such as tax, from last May. However, it gave Ryanair until the end of January to comply. That deadline passed with Ryanair promising to overhaul its booking site this month.
The OFT had not decided whether Ryanair had complied with its instruction as Travel Weekly went to press.