Tiger Airways Australia temporarily suspended ticket sales late on yesterday night after warnings from the nation's consumer regulators that it needed to provide better advice for customers.
Far from welcoming the step, a "bewildered" Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chairman, Graeme Samuel, said Tiger took too long to respond to the regulators' concerns.
"It's not a question of welcoming, it's a question of saying well at long last they've responded," Mr Samuel said.
"I'd have to say that the reaction of Tiger in the period from Monday morning through to Tuesday night was far from satisfactory at all, well the reaction was nothing, no response.
"There was 48 hours there where despite the fact that they knew that our view was that to comply with the Australian consumer law they needed to provide this advice to customers, they simply for one reason or another didn't respond and didn't deal with that appropriately for customers.
"There were a large number of customers potentially who bought tickets on Monday and Tuesday who did not have that advice and warning given to them at the time that they bought the tickets."
All of Tiger's domestic flights are suspended until early Saturday. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) has yet to decide if it will lift the grounding.
State and federal consumer regulators had warned Tiger that if it continued selling tickets for flights from Saturday, it needed to tell customers that it was uncertain whether it would be flying and that it was dependent on CASA approval.
"And they needed to stop selling tickets if they got to a point where they didn't reasonably expect to resume flights," Mr Samuel said.
Mr Samuel would not detail what action the consumer bodies may take against Tiger, or if it had broken consumer laws.
"We are now in continual and constant contact with Tiger on this matter," he said.
The ACCC and state bodies are demanding that Tiger explain why it took 48 hours to respond and take the appropriate action on its website and call centre.
The regulators will also continue to monitor the airline's dealings with customers, including the issue of refunds if flights aren't back on Saturday and ensuring the required warnings are in place when ticket sales resume.
aap 6 Jul 2011
This is another example of blatant consumer rip off and fraud.
In Australia, stealing is a crime.
Many companies withhold monies from consumers in their holding accounts, denying the customer his own interest in the bank if the monies were returned.
This is in both plain English, and legal jargon, theft or stealing.
The law deliberately ignores this this theft is it is the business (cronies of the legal community) community that profits.
Laws are made to the detriment of the masses only to support fraud of businesses.
No comments:
Post a Comment