The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned four social ads from Thomas Cook, loveholidays and DialAFlight.
It ruled the three online travel agents’ adverts made misleading claims about accommodations’ environmental credentials.
Thomas Cook pulled a paid-for Google ad for a package holiday to Sandos Caracol Eco Resort in Mexico over the term ‘Eco Resort’.
The company said online tools generated the wording based on search terms and has now blocked ‘Sandal Caracol Eco’ as a search keyword term.
The ASA also banned two loveholidays Google adverts promoting Green Garden Eco Resort in Tenerife and Marvida Family Eco Hotel in Turkiye over the use of ‘eco’.
In response to the investigation, loveholidays said the resort and hotel names in the adverts were the trading names provided by their third-party suppliers.
Finally, DialAFlight took down a paid-for Meta advert describing the Jumeirah at Saadiyat Island Resort in Abu Dhabi as an ‘eco-conscious resort’. It said the claim ‘eco-conscious resort’ had been taken from a factsheet provided by the accommodation.
The ASA said it upheld the complaints because ‘the basis of environmental claims must be clear and consumers needed sufficient information about the basis of such a claim to understand what environmental characteristics or benefits were being referred to’.
