Have you been booking flight tickets by internet sometimes? What do you think about those ticket sites?
I’ve always found them a bit annoying, because they’re not so very user friendly. What’s worse is also that they’re promising cheap flight tickets in ads, but then when really looking into it and actually trying to book a ticket for that cheap price, there isn’t one to find.
There have been an investigation of 447 of those sites in 16 European countries in the end of September 2007, both leading airline companies and low price companies, which now clearly shows that over half of them is breaking EU:s consumer laws.
The investigated countries were: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Austria.
What they found was that they contain misleading advertising and not allowed marketing methods. The total price must be clearly given and any limited access of cheap tickets must be declared.
It kind of surprises me (and in the same time not) that they think that they don’t have to follow the law… Though I suspect that it has been as it has, because they have known that no one is following it up. Very sloppy I think.
They don’t seem to care about how many customer they lose this way obviously. If people are like me, they get very annoyed coming to this site and very negative against the company, so it’s actually very bad marketing.
Those flight companies will be contacted by national authorities and be urged to correct their internet ticket sites. They’ve got 4 months to answer to this before any legal action will be taken or exposing of the names of the air companies.
In my opinion that is too long. How hard could it be to change it, if they really wanted to?