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Budget airline Ryanair has been banned from claiming that its London to Brussels flight is faster and cheaper than making the same journey by Eurostar.

In a ruling published today the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) concluded that the speed claim was likely to mislead consumers because it failed to take into account time taken to travel from the relevant airports to the centres of the two cities.

The advertising watchdog also stressed that Ryanair was wrong to claim that passengers would find it cheaper to fly to Brussels due to the costs they were likely to incur in travelling to and from the two airports.

Ryanair had claimed in a national press ad that its flight to Brussels was "faster and cheaper" than Eurostar, based on an overall flight time of one hour and ten minutes versus a two hour and 11 minute train journey.

The ASA said that the comparison was misleading because it did not take into account the time it would take passengers to travel from the centre of London to Stansted airport, some 40km away. Nor did the ad allow for transfer times between the centre of Brussels and Charleroi airport, some 46km away from the heart of the Belgium capital.

Transfer times between the airports and the centre of the two European cities would add approximately one hour and 45 minutes to the journey of passengers flying between London and Brussels with Ryanair, the ASA said.

In addition the regulator stressed that passengers travelling between airports and the centres of London and Brussels were likely to incur minimum transfer costs of approximately £8, thus meaning that a Ryanair flight between the two cities would "not necessarily" be cheaper than making the same journey by Eurostar.

"We considered that many would consider the 'Brussels... cheaper' claim to refer to the whole-journey cost from London to Brussels and that the overall impression given by the ad was that that journey would always be substantially cheaper by Ryanair," explained the ASA in its ruling.

"We concluded that the claim was likely to mislead," the watchdog added.

Ryanair has now been ordered to remove the claims "Brussels faster and cheaper" and "more punctual" from similar ads.

The low-cost carrier had disputed charges that its ad was misleading.

It argued that the time taken to get to an airport or a train station by passengers was irrelevant because its marketing claims were based only on time spent travelling aboard either one of its planes or a Eurostar train.