Eurostar’s festive period, already blighted by a wildcat strike and flooding, has gone off the rails again with the train operator being pilloried for a bungled promotion which promised far more than it delivered.
The company, which is just weeks into a new ad campaign promoting a major rebrand, with a new website, new app and a new loyalty scheme to boot, launched an email marketing campaign that invited passengers to “treat yourself to a European getaway… from just £39 each way”.
The email urged holidaymakers to “make the most of the long days and sunny rays… Book now to grab a bargain to Paris, Brussels or Lille”, including a link underneath labelled “low fare finder”.
However, when one passenger tried to access the offer, they found just one seat available from London to Paris at the advertised £39 price, so they rifled off a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority, challenging whether the ad was misleading.
In its defence, Eurostar claimed a total of 39,000 seats were available at the advertised “from” rate across its routes. The operator believed the terms and conditions of the promotion were “prominently displayed directly underneath the main copy of the ad”, and that the advertised “from” price had not been exaggerated.
But the ASA was far from impressed, with data provided by Eurostar revealing that the £39 fares had made up a very small percentage of available tickets for travel between London and Paris, and Paris and London.
Data for the other two routes again showed that the £39 fares had made up a very small percentage of the total number of seats available for standard class travel for those routes in the identified timeframe.
Ruling that the promotion was misleading, the ASA warned the train operator must ensure that when using ‘from’ price claims in future, a “significant proportion” of fares must be available at the “advertised price”.
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