Ryanair's booking fee faces tough opposition

Ryanair Holdings Plc, the carrier that charges £12 (Dh70.59) for using a debit card to buy a return ticket online, will have difficulty defending the fees during a UK antitrust investigation, lawyers said. Such charges are misleading and should be scrapped, the UK Office of Fair Trading said June 28. Ryanair's claim that its "administration fee" isn't affected by the ruling is unlikely to hold up, said Robert Vidal, a competition lawyer at Taylor Wessing in London. "Calling the charge an ‘administration fee' or mentioning the option of a pre-paid MasterCard is unlikely to make any difference," Vidal said. The decision doesn't target specific companies and follows a three-month probe requested by Which?, a British consumer-rights group that said Ryanair was among airlines improperly charging travellers to use their own money. UK consumers spent £300 million in 2009 on such charges, OFT said. Ryanair says the fees cover costs for its booking system, not just payment processing, and can be avoided by using a pre-paid MasterCard instead of a regular credit or debit card. The Dublin-based company doesn't impose any debit- or credit-card transaction fees and is one of the only airlines to provide fee information on its home page, said Joe Carmody, a Ryanair spokesman. Surcharges are potentially misleading, "particularly when free payment mechanisms are only available to a small proportion of consumers, making a surcharge effectively compulsory," the OFT said in a statement. From / Gulf News