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Airport porridge prices take last-minute flight

Michael Smith was in Dublin airport last Monday and he bought some porridge from Soho Coffee, which is located close to gate A107. He says the price displayed on the board was €2.25, but he was charged €2.50 at the till. “I spoke to the supervisor and he told me that ‘the prices come in from the UK’, and they haven’t had a chance to change the display price on the board yet. I mentioned that it was illegal practice to charge more than the display price, but he didn’t seem to believe me.”

Smith says he contacted us because he doesn’t go through the airport much so won’t be able to check to see if they do in fact update the display board with the correct price.

“Somehow, I don’t think they will make the change, because the board is a nicely painted one and would be difficult to change the prices without getting a specialist painter in (ie it looks like more than a ‘few minutes’ job).”

He raises a number of points here. First off, although many people believe it to be the case, it is not illegal to charge more than the displayed price.

The displayed price is what is known as an invitation to treat – the consumer is being invited essentially to bid for the porridge – and so is not legally binding. There is no contract between consumer and retailer until money changes hands. Having said that, displaying prices which do not match the actual prices may be a breach of consumer legislation.

We contacted the airport to find out more. We contacted the Dublin Airport Authority who said the concession was run by Select Service Partners and as such was not under its remit. However it said it has been in touch with them and they had accepted that the price anomaly was an error on their part. A DAA spokeswoman said the signage had now been changed and staff had been spoken to and the error would not reoccur.

Tracking down Prize Bond winners

Another reader contacted us about Prize Bonds, which we wrote about last week. He says our point about people changing addresses and forgetting to notify the prize bonds people is valid. However, he says, “there is a simple enough solution which the Prize Bond company could implement fairly easily by extending their web-based Bond Tracker service. At present, having registered your bond numbers, you can invoke a ‘check winning numbers’ feature.”

He says this requires the bond holder to initiate the check periodically.

“If the registration process was extended to allow recording of an e-mail address, then the Prize Bond Company could speedily inform winners electronically. Additionally, it could also be changed to facilitate the correction/ confirmation of home addresses. This change may require all claims to be accompanied by the original bond certificate for security purposes.”

Clarifying refunds from Aer Lingus

Last week we carried a complaint from a reader who said he was billed twice by Aer Lingus for a single flight he booked with the airline in 2008. He said he only came across the billing error recently and contacted us to see if we could get him a refund.

We contacted the airline last week and they launched an investigation. They got back to us last Tuesday. We were told that records showed that a refund for the fare of the second ticket and a refund for the handling fee were actually processed to the customer’s account on October 27th, 2008. The airline did say they had no record of the €32 paid for the insurance being refunded.

“I assume that this is because the customer contacted us after the insurance cooling off period,” said the Aer Lingus spokeswoman. She said the Aer Lingus customer relations department would arrange for a cheque to be posted to reimburse the cost of the insurance.

Incidentally, another reader had little sympathy for our reader. She said the same thing happened to her in 2007, but it was for four flights to the US. “I was on the phone at the crack of dawn the next day sorting it out with Aer Lingus and my credit card was refunded within 3 weeks,” she writes. “Did he just pay his credit card bill and not wonder why it was so high? Is this not the kind of careless financial behaviour that got us into this mess in the first place? People need to mind their money.”