CMA opens drip-pricing cases over fees as small as £1.50

The Competition and Markets Authority has opened investigations into Trainline, Virgin Atlantic and RED Driving School over whether they showed customers the full price upfront.

The practice at issue is drip pricing: mandatory fees that appear after the headline figure. It is illegal.

The sums under scrutiny are not large. In Trainline's case the CMA said it observed fees of up to £2.79 added to headline train fares, and up to £1.50 on coach bookings.

"Both are costs that can add up for frequent travellers," the regulator said.

With RED Driving School, the CMA is examining whether mandatory booking fees and digital fees were included in the upfront price for lessons. It said those fees could be more than £7 a lesson.

The Virgin Atlantic case concerns package holidays, and whether mandatory resort fees and local taxes appeared in the prices shown at the outset. The CMA said such fees vary but can reach hundreds of pounds.

If the CMA concludes the law was broken, it can fine the companies or order them to compensate customers. Since last year it has been able to reach that conclusion without taking a business to court.

It has already used the approach in the same sector. Earlier this year the CMA ordered two other driving schools to refund more than 80,000 customers who were not shown the total price for lessons during online booking.

Trainline said it was "committed to offering customers a transparent booking experience with clear pricing and genuine value", that it had engaged with the CMA over several months, and that it was taking steps to change how certain fees are presented.

A spokesperson for Virgin Atlantic Holidays said mandatory fees are indicated at multiple stages of the booking process, and that the company is reviewing the CMA's points and will cooperate fully.

RED Driving School had not commented when the investigations were announced.

Trainline has been here before. In 2023 the Office of Rail and Road said it and six other third-party ticket sellers were not being upfront about fees.

Consumer group Which? said the regulator should not hesitate to use its powers, noting that each firm had already received a warning advisory letter. Sue Davies, its head of consumer rights policy, linked the move to the Prime Minister's comments last week that unfair pricing practices have no place in the economy.

For any founder running a checkout, the read-across is blunt. The threshold for regulatory interest is a £1.50 booking fee, not a hidden three-figure charge, and the enforcement route now runs through the regulator rather than the courts.

Two details are worth noting. The companies under investigation had reportedly been warned in writing first, and the remedy in the earlier driving school cases was refunds to tens of thousands of customers — a liability that scales with volume of sales, not with the size of the fee. Any mandatory charge that only surfaces at step three of a booking flow belongs at step one.