ACCC to crack down on misleading fare offers
CANBERRA – Australia’s competition watchdog, the ACCC, has threatened to come down hard on airlines that breach new travel consumer laws.
Writing in The Age, Clive Dorman said the travel industry has been warned there will be no grace period for changes to the Trade Practices Act to outlaw component pricing, by which a supplier advertises a price that doesn’t include additional taxes and charges.
The changes were enacted last month but had been in the pipeline for three years, since they were first proposed by the previous federal government.
Two industries travel and automobiles were singled out as the biggest users of component pricing in Australia, even though three of the four domestic airlines have voluntarily observed a pricing-transparency code for most of the past three years.
ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel warned, "There will be no forbearance, there’ll be no concessions because this has been on the cards for three years."
Samuel said Tiger Airways was sailing close to the wind when it advertised "free" airfares last month that did not include compulsory taxes and charges, now an illegal practice.
However, he said other airlines, such as Jetstar, may also have to alter their website booking procedures, which until last week were still providing a "headline"’ price that excluded taxes and charges that take the total price (revealed pages later in the process) much higher sometimes double.
And foreign travel retail websites, such as US-based Orbitz, were warned they also could find themselves in trouble as the ACCC awaits a clarification of the law about the definition of doing business in Australia.
"It doesn’t matter where they originate from," Samuel says of such websites and travel retailers.
"If they’re carrying on business in Australia and it relates to their Australian business, then they’ll have to comply with the law."
Source: The Age, Melbourne
Ian Jarrett
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