“Government officials will contact airlines and demand full transparency of service schemes and their accurate display on company websites within four months. Those who fail to do so will have to close their online resources,” the study says.
For now, the names of the careless airlines are not disclosed, reports Strana.Ru, but after the allotted four months, all those who have not “cleaned up” their web content will be named. However, in some countries, the names of negligent or simply dishonest airline representatives are already being mentioned.
Last month, the consumer protection commission in Spain announced that it had found inaccurate information on seven out of 12 airline websites, including the site of Ryanair, Europe's largest low-cost carrier. Also on the blacklist are Spanish carriers Vueling, Iberia, and Spainair. “Ryanair and Spanish companies are now under our close scrutiny,” a European Commission representative said in an interview with Reuters.
Consumer advocates in Brussels, conducting their own investigation on the same issue, focused primarily on incorrectly stated prices and various “pitfalls” in consumer contracts. Typical violations include stating the ticket price without airport fees and other additional charges that the customer learns about post factum. Some airlines offer tickets for free or at a low price, but in reality they are unavailable to consumers. It also happens that the key terms related to ticket sales for a given airline are not available in the consumer's language during booking, and sometimes they are completely absent from the site. And finally, very often companies provide no information about ticket refund procedures or date changes on an order.
The worst “no-fly weather” is currently in Belgium. There, out of 48 existing airline websites, 46 are working incorrectly. Over Austria, on the other hand, is a cloudless sky: all 20 local airline websites are perfect.
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