Ryanair has accused Thomas Cook of “deception, mis-selling and fraud” after the travel agency levied a £82 fuel surcharge on two Ryanair passengers last year.
The budget airline, which guarantees no fuel surcharges on its flights, was up in arms on Tuesday and called upon the AUC, the OFT and the Department of Transport to take action against Thomas Cook.
Although passengers are only supposed to book Ryanair flights direct from the airline’s website, some high street agencies and online travel sites have continued to ‘screen scrape’ for Ryanair flights. Thomas Cook itself stopped selling Ryanair flights last year.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said: “This is a perfect example of the type of mis-selling scams being perpetrated by travel agents and screenscrapers (through unauthorised access to Ryanair’s website) on unsuspecting customers across the UK.
“Ordinary passengers are being booked on Ryanair flights, but are being massively overcharged anything up to five times the underlying airfare, and in this case of blatant mis-selling, consumers were also charged a totally non-existent £80 “airline fuel surcharge” each, when no such fuel surcharges exist. This is a clear case of Thomas Cook engaging in deception, mis-selling and fraud upon these consumers.”
Thomas Cook said it was an isolated incident due to a system error and that it would be investigating the matter and offering the customers a refund.