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# Hoover Offered Two Free Return Flights to America to Anyone Who Spent £100 on Its Products. Customers Bought the £119 Vacuum Cleaner to Get Them, and the Promotion Cost Its Owner $72 Million.
- URL: https://whywecanthavenicethings.info/hoover-free-flights-promotion-1992-cost-maytag-72-million/
- Published: 2026-10-08T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T15:59:59.000Z
- Author: The Complaints Department
- Tags: Obituaries

In August 1992, Hoover's British operation had a warehouse full of vacuum cleaners and washing machines it could not sell. Its solution, as the BBC later summarised it, was simple: spend £100 on any Hoover product and two free return flights, initially to Europe, could be yours. The offer ran in Britain and Ireland. In December the company improved it. Purchasers of qualifying products could now have two return tickets to New York or Orlando. The television advertising carried the tag-line "Two return seats: Unbelievable."

The cheapest qualifying product was a vacuum cleaner costing £119\. According to United Press International, many customers bought exactly that, and there was reportedly a flourishing secondhand market in the appliance. Sales promotion professionals estimated that Hoover sold an extra 80,000 appliances over December and January. Hoover's US parent, Maytag Corporation of Newton, Iowa, would later describe the result in its annual report as "additional costs associated with two Hoover Europe 'free flights' promotion programs."

## The Small Print

The offer was generous. The terms were not. The flights were available, according to the BBC, "only if you were determined enough to make it through the maze of small print and Hoover's travel agents' attempts to sell you profitable extras designed to offset the cost of the promotion." Under the terms, Hoover dictated when customers could fly. Applicants nominated dates and departure airports, and the company's travel operators told them which ones were unavailable.

Parliament noticed early. On 16 December 1992, the month the American offer launched, Brian Donohoe MP tabled an Early Day Motion viewing "with major concern" press reports about the deal and seeking "assurances from the company that all holiday travel offers will be honoured." Thirty-eight MPs signed it.

The BBC's consumer programme Watchdog sent a researcher, Hilary Bell, to film secretly inside one of the travel companies. The equipment was hidden in an Adidas bag large enough to threaten the whole operation. "I might as well have just worn a T-shirt saying Film Crew," she said. What she found, the BBC reported, would see resignations from Hoover's top management.

## The Charge

On the evening of 30 March 1993, Maytag announced the removal of three executives at Hoover Europe: William Foust, its president; Brian Webb, vice president of UK marketing; and Michael Gilbey, director of marketing services. UPI reported that an estimated 200,000 people were claiming their tickets to the United States, and that Hoover had already put more than £20 million into meeting demand. Maytag said the offer had led to "significant unanticipated costs" and took a $30 million charge against first-quarter earnings.

"These promotions were flawed and we are taking strong steps to rectify the situation," said Maytag's chairman, Leonard Hadley. A spokeswoman at Hoover UK's headquarters in Wales was more precise about the extent of the commitment. "Subject to the terms and conditions of the promotion," she said, "Hoover will honor its commitment to its customers."

Maytag's 1994 annual report, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, sets out the bill. The company booked a $50 million special charge in the first quarter of 1993 for the two European promotions, plus $10.4 million in selling, general and administrative expenses, for a 1993 total of $60.4 million before tax. A further $12.2 million had been charged in 1992\. Before that special charge, the company noted, its 1993 operating income would have been $208.9 million rather than $158.9 million.

## The Dates

The terms and conditions were honoured with some precision. On 11 March 1994, John Evans, the MP for St Helens North, tabled a motion describing the promotion as "a wicked confidence trick perpetrated by an unscrupulous company." His evidence was domestic. His wife had bought a Hoover appliance in February 1993 and nominated three flight dates, in April 1993, October 1993 and January 1994, from three airports: Manchester, Gatwick and Glasgow. Hoover, the motion said, made no attempt to honour any of them. It instead offered 25, 26 or 27 January 1994, and then insisted that "the making of an utterly unusable offer" had discharged its obligations. Thirty-nine MPs signed it.

Eleven days later Evans was back. The Evening Standard had reported on 17 March that Hoover's travel firm, Your Leisure, was selling Britain–United States return tickets to bucket shops for as little as £139, while denying thousands of customers who had bought Hoover goods the flights they thought they were entitled to. The motion asked Maytag to extend the offer beyond the end of April. Thirty-six MPs signed that one.

Not every customer petitioned Parliament. David Dixon, a horse trainer from High Seaton in Cumbria, bought a washing machine to get the flights, and the washing machine broke down. The engineer sent to fix it told him, by Dixon's account, "If you think buying a washing machine's going to get you two tickets to America, you must be an idiot." Dixon took the engineer's van, and became, in the BBC's phrase, a national hero overnight. "I said; 'I'm not as stupid as you are. I'm not going to have to walk home'," he told the BBC.

## The Pressure Group

Harry Cichy founded the Hoover Holiday Pressure Group. "To my astonishment, the Royal mail van would turn up every day," he told the BBC. "One bag to start with, then two bags, then three bags. We ended up with about 8000 members." The membership was not a single demographic. "One day a judge would phone up, next day a professor, the next minute it was a pig farmer from Gloucester." The campaign took up six years of his life and took him to Iowa, to the headquarters of Hoover's American parent. With the group's help, hundreds of customers took Hoover to the small claims courts.

Maytag left first. In May 1995 it agreed to sell Hoover Europe to the Italian manufacturer Candy for about $170 million, recording a loss of about $130 million on the sale. Marketing Week reported that the promotion had by then cost £48 million, and that the sale did not include the problem: any future payments arising from it would be met by Maytag.

## The Test Cases

In February 1997 Judge Bennett found that Hoover had abused its "one application per household" rule by cancelling every claim from the same address, when it should have honoured one. He awarded two complainants more than £450 each. Hoover appealed. Marketing Week counted at least 70 other cases heard in the small claims courts, of which Hoover had lost about one in five. The next test case concerned two customers denied all six of their chosen dates as "unavailable" and then offered alternatives they said were unreasonable. The original promotion had promised that people could fly "whenever they liked between February 1 1993 and April 30 1994."

The trade paper's arithmetic was that about 600,000 people had expected a holiday, about 300,000 vouchers had been issued, and 220,000 people had flown. Hoover's spokeswoman, Caroline Knight, said the promotion "is over and done with." "We continually make the point that this promotion ended in 1993 and I am not prepared to hash over old ground," she said. The Advertising Standards Authority, meanwhile, had revised its code to state that "no promotion should bring the promotions industry into disrepute."

The vacuum cleaner cost £119\. The promotion that came with it cost Maytag $72.6 million in pre-tax charges and three executives, before Maytag sold the European business at a loss of about $130 million. Five years after it ended, Hoover was still defending it in court, at St Helens County Court on Merseyside. St Helens North was the constituency of the MP whose wife had been offered 25, 26 or 27 January.

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*Filed from public reporting:*

- [BBC News — "Hoover's free flights fiasco recalled"](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3704669.stm)
- [United Press International — "Hoover top executives fired for free flights offer"](https://www.upi.com/Archives/1993/03/31/Hoover-top-executives-fired-for-free-flights-offer/6398733554000/)
- [Maytag Corporation — "Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 1994"](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/63541/000006354195000004/0000063541-95-000004.txt)
- [House of Commons Early Day Motion 1103 (1992–93) — "Holiday Travel Offers"](https://www.edms.org.uk/1992-93/1103.htm)
- [House of Commons Early Day Motion 820 (1993–94) — "Hoover Free Flight Promotion"](https://www.edms.org.uk/1993-94/820.htm)
- [House of Commons Early Day Motion 913 (1993–94) — "Hoover Free Flights And Bucket Shops"](https://www.edms.org.uk/1993-94/913.htm)
- [The Spokesman-Review (wire services) — "Maytag Plans To Sell Hoover Europe Unit"](https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/may/31/maytag-plans-to-sell-hoover-europe-unit/)
- [Marketing Week — "Candy poised to buy ailing Hoover Europe"](https://www.marketingweek.com/candy-poised-to-buy-ailing-hoover-europe/)
- [Marketing Week — "Hoover fails to shake off free flights horror"](https://www.marketingweek.com/hoover-fails-to-shake-off-free-flights-horror/)