I am seeing a disturbing advertising trend happening on Facebook and other social sites. That trend is, what I consider misleading information, not by the airlines, but by the third party sites that sell airline tickets.
I saw an ad on Facebook by one of these sites that while true, was very misleading. The ad stated “Roundtrip air to Maui for $129 per person.” This is an unbelievable deal until you click on the site and did the research where the actual flights were $129 per person roundtrip from Honolulu to Maui, not roundtrip from the mainland to Maui as the ad would try to lead you to believe.
I saw another ad from one of these sites that stated “Roundtrip trip to Costa Rica for $179 per person.” I searched the site and other sites and could not find roundtrip flights from anywhere in the U.S. to Costa Rica for that price. Most flights were in the $600 – $700 per person range. I did find some flights in the $200 – $300 per person range in Oct from Ft. Lauderdale.
While these ads do not really lie they are worded in such a way that they are very misleading.
By Airline rules no company is allowed to sell the exact same flights any lower than the airline sells them for. What these ads leave out is the fact that they can get you a cheaper flight than you may be seeing but it will be a different flight than the one you want at and will probably contain 1 or more connections or extremely long layovers. Another thing to be careful of is flights that may have great flight times but say in small writing, “next day arrival or plus 1”. I have looked at flights that have reasonable prices but when looking at the flight times it took 20 hrs. and next day arrival to get there when non-stop flights take 4 hours to get there.
Why do these ads do this? It is to get you on their site because they know a certain portion of the population will stay on the site and buy something, even if it is not what was advertised.
Just remember that the Airlines require that flights that have identical characteristics and are the same exact flight you may be looking at have to be sold at the same price by everyone. You may get a cheaper price but to do this something will change concerning the cheaper flight.
Even though not flat out lying do you agree that this advertising practice is responsible or misleading?