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?
♥ Lifecruiser
Hi Lifecruiser!!
I have also found that in US sometimes the hotel booking through internet does not reveal all the costs…like the last time I had traveled to LA, the hotel charged me extra for parking and some other services. In such situations the feeling of being duped is very, very irritating!
And Thanks for stopping by and leaving a thoughtful note on my site. It is really encouraging.
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I don’t know why but for the past two days, I couldn’t get into your site – some kind of error there but thankfully, I see all is fine today between my computer and blogger and your site and such. Have a great day.
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Jeni, about your problem to reach Lifecruiser: it may be that my webhost have been having problem or doing some maintenance during the nights in the weekend. We have different time zones, so my night is probably some time in your evening.
I’ve also noticed that sometimes they have some kind of DNS problem, so if you try to reach me by just lifecruiser.org without the www in front, it can sometimes lead to an error.
I do hope it will improve
There has been a lot of discussion about cheap airlines offering flights costing next to nothing and then adding on taxes etc. I believe they have changed the law in the UK and they are required to show the taxes up front now. Certainly Flybe, which is the one we have been using quite a lot, has changed.
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Airfares have been a lottery for years – with so many rules and restrictions even professional travel agents did have and still have problems.
I allways check at least 5 different internet sites before I descide.
For the same flight I’ve seen enormous differences . f.i, Oslo – Buenos Aires t/r – From NOK 7950 to NOK 32.065 (Ecomic Class).
I like this one:
http://ip.norwegian.no/ip/FareCalendarExecAction.aspx?SkipDaysLeft=5&app_language=nb-NO&D_City=OSL&A_City=NCE
Have a great week.
PS. I’ll post more tomorrow. Did visit my mother this afternoon. Showed her all the pictures from my visit to Ingelin.
TorAa’s last blog post..Saturday Evening – in SOBE – Nov 10 -2007
I’m surprised that Germany is not listed in there. I always see advertisements promising trips from such and such amount starting at €150 but when you start to click and look for that offer you end up only finding double or triple the price!
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