Germany: extention of previously announced early booking discount period not misleading

Defendant, a tour organizer organizing packages for children announced on his website an early booking discount of EUR 25 for a particular package if booking was made until March 31, 2009 latest. He then extended this period to April 17 and on Arpil 21 announced that the discount will be granted for every booking until April 30. However, even after the latter date defendant went on granting the discount. A costumer was told that this was because of favourable acquisition prices which were unexpectedly still available and which defendant wanted to pass on.Plaintiff (probably a competitor) regarded the advertising as misleading and sued for unfair competition.Both first instance court (Landgericht Bielefeld) and appelate court (Oberlandesgericht Hamm) dismissed the claim: whether or not an advertisment was misleading always depended on the time of the announcement. As plaintiff did not claim that defendant had made the announcements with the intention to later extend the discount period, the announcements could not be regarded misleading as each of them was true at the time of its announcement and the announced limitations only were extended later on due to the circumstances.Full text of judgement I-4 U 52/10 of OLG Hamm of Sep. 2, 2010 available in German here>>.

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