UK regulator bans three travel ads over unexplained eco hotel claims

The UK Advertising Standards Authority banned three travel ads on 9 September because they called hotels “eco” without saying what that meant. The ads came from Thomas Cook, Loveholidays and DialAFlight.

Two Google ads and one Meta ad broke the rules

Loveholidays ran two search ads on Google naming a “Green Garden Eco Resort” and a “Marvida Family Eco Hotel”. Thomas Cook ran a search ad for “Sandos Caracol Eco Resort” with flights included. DialAFlight ran a Meta ad for a resort in Abu Dhabi that invited people to reconnect with their surroundings at an eco-conscious resort.

All three ads are now banned in their current form.

ASA says buyers read “eco” as an environmental promise

The regulator’s reasoning was short. People who see the word eco in an ad take it to mean the hotel does something for the environment. None of the three ads said what that something was, and nothing in the ad let a reader check.

The point is not that the hotels are bad. It is that the ad made a claim it never supported.

Thomas Cook blames Google’s automated ad tools

Each company answered differently. Loveholidays said the words were part of the hotels’ own trading names, then updated its listings and pulled the ads. DialAFlight said the phrase came from the accommodation factsheet supplied by the hotel, which also sent a list of its environmental measures.

Thomas Cook pointed at automation. The company said Google’s Performance Max and Dynamic Search Ads built the ad text themselves, and that the resort had changed its name in July 2025. It has since blocked the phrase as a search term.

That defence did not save the ad. Whoever pays for the campaign owns what the campaign says, even when a machine wrote the line. Buyers running feed-driven campaigns should note it: Google keeps handing more of the build to automation, and the responsibility does not move with it.

Miles Lockwood wants advertisers to spell the claim out

Miles Lockwood, the ASA’s director of complaints, said people booking with the environment in mind need information they can trust about what an eco label covers. The regulator has been active on wording this year, and in a separate case it banned a Sports Direct ad over price claims.

What travel and retail teams should change in their feeds

The practical fix sits in the data, not in the creative brief. If a supplier’s name or factsheet carries the word eco, that word will end up in an automatically built ad. So the safest step is to strip environmental adjectives out of feed fields, or attach the evidence next to them.

Where a hotel really does something measurable, name it in the ad: solar power, refilled water stations, a certification with a body behind it. A claim that can be checked is worth more than a word that cannot.