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Budget airline Ryanair has been rapped over an advert headlined “Robbed by lastminute.com?”.

The airline used a picture of a burglar dragging a bag of money with “online agent” written on his top.

Its advert accused online agents of ripping off customers and overcharging them by “100% or more”.

It drew an angry complaint from lastminute.com which has been upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority.

The watchdog has told Ryanair not to re-use it “in its current form”.

Ryanair had provided no evidence that lastminute.com overcharged customers, the ASA said.

It added: “We concluded that the claim in conjunction with the image of a robber misleadingly and unfairly discredited Lastminute’s business.”

Lastminute also objected to the advert’s claims that online agents: “Don’t provide correct terms and conditions” and “Don’t notify schedule changes”.

The ASA upheld both of these complaints, saying they were misleading.

In response, Ryanair said Lastminute was not authorised to sell its flights and that the firm inflated its prices without its consent.

Last week’s investigation into airline customer service prompted a flurry of responses. Here is a selection.

Last week Telegraph Travel tested how travellers are treated by our leading airlines. In examining the response times of the airlines’ customer service departments to some simple questions, we found that it was often not the no-frills carriers that failed our tests.

Thomsonfly and Flybe were the best performers, while charter and scheduled airlines often performed badly - XL Airways, for example, has still failed to answer our emails after more than four weeks, while on three occasions we were unable even to get through on the phone to British Airways.

When we asked readers whether they felt they had been getting a fair deal from airlines, we were inundated with responses.

Original Article