ASA raps Qatar Airways and Eurowings over environmental claims

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has censured Qatar Airways and Eurowings about environmental claims in the airlines’ marketing.

 

The authority said its rulings form “part of a wider piece of work on carbon offsetting claims in the air travel sector”.

 

The adverts were identified for investigation following intelligence gathering by the ASA’s Active Ad Monitoring system, which uses AI to proactively search for online marketing that might break the rules.

 

With Qatar Airways, the ASA challenged whether the claims “bulk offset the carbon emissions for your past and future flights” in an advert and “Travel consciously by offsetting your flight’s carbon footprint” in another ad gave a misleading impression about the environmental impact of travelling with the advertised airline.

 

In response, the Qatar Airways Group said that the ads promoted a voluntary carbon offsetting programme for corporate customers as part of its Beyond Business rewards scheme.

 

They said the ads had been targeted at corporate LinkedIn users and subscribing business customers, not individual leisure passengers, and that the intended audience had a higher level of knowledge about carbon offsetting and sustainability reporting.

 

Qatar Airways said its offsetting scheme had been developed with Iata and was independently audited each year through a Quality Assurance Standards process carried out by an independent professional services firm.

 

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The ASA said: “We acknowledged the evidence provided by Qatar Airways in respect of its offsetting programme, including the calculation methodology and evidence that verified carbon credits had been retired, meaning they had been used and could not be claimed again.

 

“However, while the evidence demonstrated the existence and operation of an offsetting programme, it did not show the carbon emissions from specific past or future flights booked with Qatar Airways would be fully offset through the scheme or that the environmental impact of the flights was reduced.

 

“The ASA concluded the ads were likely to mislead about the environmental impact of travelling with Qatar Airways and welcomed the airline’s assurance the ads had been withdrawn.”

With German low-cost carrier Eurowings, the ASA challenged a paid-for Google ad which stated: “Travel […] more eco-friendly [sic] thanks to […] CO2-compensation. Travel climate-consciously by offsetting up to 100% of your carbon emissions per flight”.

 

The ASA challenged whether the ad gave a misleading impression of the environmental impact of travelling with the advertised airline.

 

In response, Eurowings said its search engine advertising (SEA) team had removed all paid search advertising copy containing references to “CO2 compensation” and similar climate-related claims.

 

It had implemented measures to ensure no climate-related ad copy could be served going forward.

 

The ASA upheld the challenge, saying: “The ad stated consumers could travel ‘more eco-friendly’ and ‘climate-consciously’ because Eurowings offered a carbon dioxide (CO2) compensation scheme and the option to offset up to 100% of a flight’s carbon emissions.

 

“The ASA considered that the overall impression of the ad was that consumers could travel in a way that had a lower environmental impact due to the compensation and offsetting options cited.

 

“The inclusion of the term ‘climate-consciously’ reinforced that impression, and consumers would understand from the ad that up to 100% of the emissions from a specific flight, or flights, booked with Eurowings could be fully offset.”

 

The ASA said it did not see evidence that consumers could fully offset the emissions from specific flights booked with Eurowings and in doing so, reduce the environmental impact of their flight.

 

“For that reason, we concluded the ad was likely to mislead about the environmental impact of travelling with Eurowings. We welcomed Eurowings’ assurance that the claims had been removed,” said the ASA.

 

“The ad must not appear again in the form investigated.

 

“We told Eurowings GmbH to ensure future ads did not give a misleading impression of the impact caused by travelling with them, and that they did not state or imply consumers could pay to fully offset the carbon emissions from a specific flight unless they held suitably robust substantiation to support the claims.”