Powerful consumer advocacy group Choice has launched a ‘ditch the ticks’ campaign against Jetstar which it says can add up to 67% to the cost of a domestic airfare.
Ditch the ticks refers to the pre-ticked boxes consumers encounter when working their way through a low cost carrier reservation.
While Tigerair and Virgin are not blameless, Choice says Jetstar is by far the worst offender for “sneaky pre-selected extras”.
Typical pre-selected extras include travel insurance, luggage fees, seat selection and even charity donations.
“If the customer doesn’t notice these extras or manually uncheck the boxes during booking, the airlines add the costs to a customer’s final fare,” said Brent Savage, Policy and Campaigns Advisor at Choice.
“In our comparison we found that Jetstar was the worst offender, with preselected optional extras adding 67% to the advertised fare cost of a flight from Sydney to Melbourne.
“We think customers are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves whether they want to pay for these optional extras and that airlines should stop adding costs that not every customer needs.”
Couldn’t agree more… I am very web-savvy and I still got done by the Jetstar Travel insurance add-on that was pre-selected.
There was certainly no mention of A product disclosure statement which should be a mandatory requiremnt of selling insurance.
They then don’t fully disclose all the items in your shopping cart before payment. You can’t actually see that its even in your shopping cart without reading the fine print and selecting the “show more” prompt.
Worst of all they then wouldn’t refund me the money 5 mins later when I rang them to fix the error. I had to ring the insurance agency seperately duing business hours and make a claim. Took over a week to sort it out
Terribly deceptive conduct from Jetstar. There is no other explanation