Budget airline Ryanair admits breaking fare clarity rules on its website

The carrier's website does not show prices that include taxes and charges at the earliest opportunity - flouting an Office of Fair Trading (OFT) ruling made last year.

Ryanair blamed the matter, which has been occurring since June 25, on a 'system error' that engineers were working hard to rectify.

Breach: Ryanair's website has been flouting official fare clarity rules on its website for almost a month

The OFT ruled that all UK airlines should include 'fixed non-optional' costs within their headline fares. Ryanair had complied with the ruling.

Currently on the airline's homepage, a customer wishing to make a booking selects the desired destination and the date they wish to travel.

After clicking, a list of available flights appears on the next page, along with the price of each option. But these prices exclude taxes and charges.

Only on the next page, page three, are the taxes and charges added in.

Customers are alerted to the fact on the page where the full fares are meant to appear, with a statement saying: 'We regret, due to system performance issues, we have been unable to display the tax inclusive fare box on this page, since 25/06/2008.

'We are currently working with our suppliers, including Navitaire to resolve these problems and hope to restore the tax, fees & charges inclusive display shortly.'

A Ryanair spokesman said: 'The full price needs to be shown on the earliest available web page which in our case is page two. They are currently shown on page three. This is a problem with our system and we have people working to try and fix it.'

The spokesman was unable to say when the problem might be fixed.

A spokesman for the OFT said: 'We are aware of the issues on the Ryanair website and we are currently addressing the matter with Ryanair.'

In February this year, Ryanair shut its website down completely for several days so a system upgrade could be installed.