Opinion: new rules targeting drip pricing con don't go far enough

By only focusing on mandatory charges, Government is letting sneaky retailers off the hook.

Shopping online can be a frustrating experience. You head to a certain retailer, attracted by a competitive headline price for the good or service that you are looking to buy.

However, by the time you get to the checkout, the price you’re being quoted is suddenly rather different, with a range of unexpected and unclear fees and charges thrown on top.

Now you have a difficult decision to make. Do you walk away, and hope to find a cheaper deal elsewhere ‒ once that rival retailer has added their own fees on top of course ‒ or do you take the hit and accept you’ll be paying more than you thought?

It’s a sneaky practice that you see in all sorts of different sectors, and it’s one that the Government has declared war on this week.

But will its plans actually make a difference?

Protecting shoppers

This week the Government announced it would be adapting the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill, currently working its way through Parliament, to include protection against ‘drip pricing’.

Drip pricing is where further charges are ‘dripped’ onto your bill as you go through the process of buying something online.

A good example here would be buying concert tickets, where you might see an initial price, but end up having to pay a larger sum at the checkout once processing and booking fees are added.

It’s a costly issue ‒ the Government reckons people end up spending an additional £2.2 billion every year, with transport, communication, entertainment and hospitality all sectors where the practice is most common.

To tackle this, the legislation will force retailers to include any mandatory fees in the headline price, or at least make it clear at the very start.

These rules don’t go far enough

It’s obviously welcome that the Government has not only noticed that retailers are employing these drip pricing tactics, but have also resolved to act on the issue.

As such, the pledge to clamp down on drip pricing is clearly a good thing.

The problem is that the measures don’t go far enough, and represent merely a start rather than an actual solution.

The fact that they only apply to mandatory fees is positive since we must have a proper idea of what the product or service is going to cost from the outset.

The trouble is that there are an awful lot of additional fees that can be added as you go through the process which aren’t strictly mandatory, but can add up significantly.

As we wrote about last year, it’s impossible to book a flight without being virtually overwhelmed by the add-on charges for everything from selecting your seat or a decent luggage allowance to access to the onboard WiFi. 

A study from NetVoucherCodes in 2023 found that almost 90% of airline carriers have at least one add-on charge in place, so prevalent is the practice.

And the reality is that as you go through the booking process, being bombarded left and right with additional charges, it’s easy to let one or two slip through.

If the expectation is on individual shoppers to manually remove each charge, then it’s inevitable that some people will end up spending more than they need to occasionally, through no real fault of their own.

Protections must go further

In the grand scheme of things, I’m not convinced this law change is really going to make much of a difference to shoppers.

There’s no reason for retailers to clean up their act and be more upfront about additional charges ‒ effectively all it does is force them to include the booking fee at the outset.

They will continue to bombard us with page after page of ‘optional’ extras, knowing full well that some of us will either not notice that we are signed up to something we don’t need, or have long lost the will to live and simply accepted some additional charge.

It’s important therefore that the Government doesn’t rest on its laurels, and assume that it has completed the job here.

If it is serious about tackling drip pricing then it needs to be much stronger on pushing greater transparency of the non-mandatory charges.