The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) today announced it will uphold Which?’s super complaint and enforce transparency on budget airline surcharges for customers who pay by debit or credit card. Martin Lewis, creator of MoneySavingExpert.com, argues that ‘it’s time to stop people having to jump around like performing monkeys’…
This important announcement by the OFT can only be seen as the beginning. The move towards greater transparency is important, but it’s also crucial to understand the OFT doesn’t have the power to force companies to actually change their pricing and make surcharges proportionate.
What we need is a law that says for online transactions the core price advertised must be what you would pay by using a debit card.
The current system of budget airline surcharges for both debit and credit cards is a scam. By allowing a niche payment system like Electron to be free, they get away with excluding these surcharges from their core price. That needs to end.
Over the last few years Ryanair’s made consumers jump around like performing monkeys, first saying they needed an Electron card to book without surcharges, then switching it to a prepaid Mastercard.
While I support breaking out some truly voluntary charges, such as baggage, if charges are effectively compulsory, the budget airlines need to man-up and put them in the full price.
By Martin Lewis
Founder
MoneySavingExpert.com
Full info at www.moneysavingexpert.com/budgetairlineoft
