The Advertising Standards Association (ASA) has upheld a complaint by easyJet holidays over an advert by On the Beach that claimed it offered the same package at a cheaper price.
The advert, in an email on 20 August 2025, claimed a Portugal holiday with On the Beach was £592 cheaper than an easyJet holidays one.
The subject line said: “Found: your identical holiday for £592 less”. The body text said: “Deal of the Week. We’re £592 cheaper than easyJet holidays for this jolly departing on 16th September 2025”.
The promotion said the On the Beach holiday was identical to the easyJet holiday and a saving of £592 would be available when customers clicked through to the landing page and booked around the time they received the email. It added that prices were dynamic and subject to change.
When the complainant clicked on the ‘Reveal this Deal’ button in the email on 21 August, easyJet’s own package was shown as £1,802. This included a £100 promotional discount.
The On the Beach holiday price shown on the landing page at that point was £1,983 – more than £900 higher than the price On the Beach said applied to its package at the time of the comparison.
EasyJet argued the price comparison was misleading.
On the Beach said the holiday was the same in all material aspects as the one offered by easyJet holidays. The only difference was that the On the Beach holiday included Ryanair flights, with a 20kg baggage allowance compared to 23kg with easyJet flights.
The ASA said: “We understood that easyJet holidays had operated a £100 website promotion at the time which reduced the effective package price for consumers who applied the promotional code, and that On the Beach had excluded such promotional savings from their comparison.
“Given the prominence of the ‘£592 cheaper’ and ‘identical holiday’ claims, we considered that excluding a genuine generally available promotional saving and relying on a different airline, with a lower baggage allowance, to achieve the headline price did not provide a like-for-like basis for an ‘identical’ comparison.”
The ASA ruled the ad to be misleading and told On the Beach it should not appear in its current form again.
A spokesperson for On the Beach said: “We accept the ASA’s decision and recognise that the use of the word identical was not suitable for the price comparison that was made.
“We have updated our approach to ensure greater transparency when communicating price comparisons with our customers going forward. This includes removing language that could imply direct equivalence, clearly displaying both our price and the competitor price, and making it clearer and easier for our customers to independently verify comparisons.”
