Mistake on Holiday Website: Should We Have to Pay Extra?

Q.

My wife and I looked on various websites for a cheap holiday for the two of us and our two children. We found a good deal for a holiday to Fuerteventura which was fairly cheap, but not ridiculously so. As such we booked it. The details on the email confirmation mention the flight out, the flight back and the hotel accomodation. It specifically states that there is no transfer included, which suits us as we always hire a car for our independence.

Late this afternoon I received a call from a representative of the holiday company stating that there had been a mistake on their websites and that the flights were not included in the price. He said if we still want the holiday we need to pay more money, which in effect more than doubles the cost of the holiday. He said I could have time to think about it and pretty much pressured me in to contacting him again tomorrow.

As far as I am concerned, they made the mistake. I booked a holiday at a certain price. The flights are on the email confirmation. Can they charge me extra like this? The cost of the flights obviously hasn't changed, but they obviously, (and they have admitted so), made a mistake and didn't charge us for them.

Now we could just walk away and have a refund, but we were looking forward to this holiday and I don't feel I should have to walk away. I thought companies had to honour the price at point of sale. Do I have a right to demand the holiday at the price we booked it at? What was a good deal, with their price hike, way more expensive than their competitors.

A.

There are two issues here. The first issue is that in contract law, a trader does not have to sell you their product at the price advertised. In fact they don't have to sell you the product at all. For example, if you were to go into a shop and see an item displayed at a particular price and it transpired that the item had been wrongly priced, you could not make the retailer sell you that item at the marked price.

A price on a display or even in a brochure is described in contract law as an 'Invitation to treat' and is simply an invitation for you to make the seller of the goods an offer to buy them. When you make this offer, the seller can refuse to sell the goods if he realises that the price displayed is a mistake. Once he realises that a mistake has been made, he should withdraw the goods from sale and put them back on sale at the correct price, inviting you to offer the correct price.

In practice, many retailers would simply decide to honour the original price because it's less hassle. But in contract law, they don't actually have to, and this is what the holiday company is relying on.

The other issue here is whether the contract to buy the goods has been completed,and this is the more difficult part of the problem. It's easy to say that there is no contract when you come up against this scenario in a shop, but when you book online and have a receipt for payment setting out what you think you've purchased, it's a greyer area.

Normally a contract is only concluded when you pay (or agree to pay) and the seller gives you your goods or services. This is called consideration. Plainly, as you haven't been on the holiday, there hasn't been any consideration on their part yet. This puts the holiday firm in breach of their contract to supply a holiday to you. You should be entitled to compensation - but can only insist on a refund, not that they provide the holiday at the cost advertised.

You have two potential courses of action - you could accept the refund and try to find a suitable holiday elsewhere, or pay more for the holiday. If you decide to pay more, you could try to claim the extra money back through the small claims court, but whether or not this will be successful depends very much on the circumstances. A district judge would look at whether the company were reasonable in asking you to pay for their mistake and may decide that they were, in this case. They will also take into account the holiday company's offer to refund.

You could also mention that you will be reporting the company to your local trading standards office for misleading advertising. Legally, whether any action will be taken is again very much dependent on the circumstances, whether the mistake was genuine and whether they continued to advertise the holidays after the mistake was noticed. But sometimes just the threat of trading standards can produce results.

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