Booking a holiday is painful enough - stop the surprise price hikes at checkout, writes Dean Dunham KC

You search for a holiday, find one at a price you can afford and think you’ve found a bargain. You click through to book and suddenly the price has changed, usually upwards.

A new Which? investigation shows just how frustrating this can be. Researchers checked more than 2,000 package holidays across five major travel websites and found dozens where the price increased after the initial search.

In some cases, the difference was as much as £580.

Now, holiday prices can change for perfectly legitimate reasons.

Airline seats sell, hotel availability changes and travel companies operate sophisticated dynamic-pricing systems. A price displayed at 9am cannot necessarily be guaranteed indefinitely. But that’s not really the issue.

The question is: when a travel company shows me a particular holiday at a particular price, can I actually buy it for that price? Because if I can’t, I’m not convinced it should be advertised to me in the first place.

Imagine walking around a supermarket and seeing a television advertised for £500. You take it to the checkout and are told: “Sorry, it’s £650 now.”

Consumers wouldn’t tolerate it.

Yet online we’ve somehow become accustomed to prices changing between search and checkout.

And there is an important distinction between genuine dynamic pricing and what consumers increasingly describe as “bait pricing” – displaying an attractive headline figure that isn’t realistically available when they try to purchase.

The Competition and Markets Authority has already made its position on pricing transparency clear: the first price consumers see should be the price they pay.

That’s the principle we should be applying here.

I’m not suggesting travel companies should be forced to hold a holiday price indefinitely.

But once I’ve clicked on a particular holiday, there should be a reasonable period in which that quoted price is honoured or, at the very least, an unmistakable warning that the figure I’m looking at isn’t live and could change before payment.

Businesses have become incredibly sophisticated at changing prices in real time.

Surely they’re sophisticated enough to tell consumers the real price in real time too.

Dynamic pricing isn’t necessarily the problem. Advertising a price the consumer can’t actually buy at is, because £999 should mean £999, not £999 until you click 'book.'

Government has the teeth, in the form of various pieces of consumer legislation, to deal with this and it’s now time to use them.

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Dean Dunham KC presents LBC's Consumer Hour every Sunday from 9pm-10pm.

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