Three names went up on the Competition and Markets Authority’s open-cases list on 19 August: Trainline, Virgin Atlantic and RED Driving School. Each is under investigation over the same practice: mandatory charges absent from the price a customer is first shown.
What the notice sets out
The sums are mostly small, which is rather the point. Per the CMA’s announcement, Trainline’s booking fees run between £0.59 and £2.79 on train tickets and £1.50 on coach bookings, while RED Driving School adds booking and digital fees of £7 or more per booking. Virgin Atlantic’s are the outlier: resort fees and local taxes on package holidays that the CMA says can reach hundreds of pounds. All three had already been sent advisory letters.
The machinery behind it is more interesting than the three names: fines of up to 10% of global turnover, orders to compensate customers, refunds. Since its new consumer powers came in it says it has secured more than £1.95 million in refunds and fines close to £6.2 million across its consumer cases as a whole; of the drip-pricing ones, the AA, BSM and StubHub UK have been fined and will refund. There is no statutory deadline for the new cases to conclude, so nobody should expect a quick answer.
The shape, not the sector
Nothing in the announcement concerns dating apps, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The shape is familiar, though: a headline number that is not the number you pay, with the remainder disclosed further down the funnel. Anyone who has bought a bundle of consumables rather than a subscription has met the form of it; we have set out before what those tiers actually gate.
The regional argument is the one we keep making. A fixed add-on costs the same in Truro as in Shoreditch and buys markedly less, because what it buys is attention from a smaller pool. Fees that look trivial in a busy market are not trivial when the market is forty people.
What to watch
Two things, neither of them fast. First, whether drip pricing stays a travel, motoring and ticketing story: the three firms fined so far all sat in one of those, and no consumer app sold as a subscription plus a shelf of one-off purchases has been named. That is not indifference to app billing — the CMA opened a separate investigation into Adobe in March over early-cancellation fees on plans that run for a year but bill monthly.
Second, the subscription measures the government set out on 9 August, now brought forward to January 2027 from the spring 2027 date the regime had slipped to: clearer terms up front, regular reminders, an easier exit, and a 14-day cooling-off period once a trial or a long contract renews. Those touch every app that bills monthly, which is very nearly all of them.
None of this alters the entry requirement on the apps in question, which remains 18 and over.