When I approached Consumer Affairs about a problem I had with the travel booking site Bravofly.com.au I found that consumer law does not require a company to provide ANY method for their customers to communicate with them!
This revelation came about after I made a booking for some flights late last year on the Bravofly.com.au website, but did not receive a confirmation email as expected. On the following Monday I attempted to ring the only number provided on the Bravofly.com.au website - but even though I was well within the nominated hours it just played a recorded message to ring back in office hours and disconnected - several times. No booking, no working contact number, no email provided. Stymied.
After booking elsewhere I eventually got through to the number 3 days after attempting to book and complained about the service and asked for an annulment of the booking (which was in their system). No go. After a month of trying patiently to point out that taking money, not providing the service and not having a working contact was not satisfactory for a travel company I only had obfuscation and false assertions in response. In the end they tickets came due and were wasted.
When I contacted Consumer Affairs to see if they could help, they told me that there is no requirement under Consumer Law for a company to be contactable!
Even though this is clearly terrible service, it is not illegal. Maybe false and misleading, but difficult to prove.
So: if you are thinking of booking on a website, check the phone contact works - and preferably get an email address also before you commit. And think hard before you book with this particular “organisation”.
Good advice @ian . Another option you could employ to get your money back, if you paid by credit/debit card and the time frame hasn’t yet passed, is to request a credit card charge back from your bank.
Thank you for posting. This is very important for all Consumers to be aware of, that if they cannot contact the business, perhaps NO BUSINESS should be the rule.
I do a lot of shopping on the Internet, and have never considered checking these details before.
Thank you for your excellent post.
I will always check companies for contact details in future.
Cheers Natalie
A phone is good and an email address is good, but neither is necessarily answered unless you test them before they are needed, sometimes more than once. I found a dodgy operator that seemed to only answer from caller-IDs that were not “problems” - you rang them once and if it was a problem they would not answer a call from that number again. Physical addresses, ABNs (and/or an ASIC company search) showing where their offices are should be added to that list of checks. Is a travel agent IATA?
Tried that with Comm and FlightCenter. Yes the bank did charge back. Only to be charged 1300 odd dollars 12 months later back on my credit card. A letter arrived after the event 7 days later to be told that the Business arm and Credit card provider are responsible to adher to the Company Flightcenter not the customer .
Wow! Thank you to all posters on this topic, as you have all opened up just so many issues, which one would expect a good consumer law to have covered.
The ACCC should be monitoring these postings as a matter of course, and on their own motions, putting revisional legislation to the national government.
Most companies have web sites with contact forms or email addresses in addition to a phone number. As was posted here, many companies ignore, do not acknowledge, and do not follow up forms / emails timely or at all.
It seems more and more companies are using voice messaging and email to shield themselves from their customers, and filter out problems into the ignore bin. Some try to replace people with technology and achieve a top Fail in implementation but do not seem interested in knowing about it, fixing it or moving on to something that works.
I doubt there is a way any company can be compelled to “answer their phone” but there should be liability for customers’ loses through the ACL when they fail to be contactable and the customer can reasonably document their attempts to contact, with the legal balance of trust placed with the customer not the company
As Maxim discovered by carefully reading the website, this company is actually overseas - in this case Switzerland. Given that, I would question whether Australian authorities have any jurisdiction over how they operate. Perhaps Ian could investigate the Swiss authorities and see whether he has any case under their consumer law particularly in relation to the main complaint of not getting what he paid for and then about the legality or otherwise of having a physical contact point for the business.
Good point @karen_seager. In theory if the site is operating in the Australian market, which it obviously is, then you’re covered by Australian Consumer Law. In practice, it’s difficult to enforce this law in other countries. We usually suggest you contact the consumer protection organisation of the country you purchased the goods from, to enforce the consumer protection laws of that country on your behalf.
Hi @JodiBird The Victorian Consumer Affairs were the ones who told me that it is not illegal to be uncontactable. I might mount a case around unconscionable conduct or false representation, but it would be hard to prove, and is probably not worth it for a couple of cheap tickets to Sydney. So I am just sharing this with the community to make the expensive lesson a bit more distributed!
I have had numerous communications with the BravoFly customer service, and they refuse to acknowledge that the phone did not work and keep insisting that they contacted me in a reasonable time by email and SMS - even though I have the messages, which were all 36 hours later.
The crux seems to be that the Monday morning I was trying to ring was still Sunday in Switzerland, and the call centre was not manned - so my calls were bounced. By Tuesday, when I got through everything was working, and they considered that OK. I had 36 hours of nothing, with other bookings depending on the flights, so booked again elsewhere. They just refuse to consider this poor enough service for a refund. I am not going to win, and they don’t care that I am unhappy. I will not be using them again!
The time difference between Europe and Australia varies between 9 and 11 hours depending on daylight saving. It sounds like this was clearly part of the problem in your case - although it also sounds like they are using every excuse they can. I still suggest you contact the Swiss equivalent of consumer affairs even if it is just to lodge a complaint. After all you never know, there may well be a litany of complaint you/we know nothing about and yours might just tip the balance causing them to act. Good luck.
Many large businesses these days want to communicate with us electronically. But has anyone noticed how difficult it is to email these companies. For example, try emailing a simple question to Coles or Flybuys or Telstra and, no doubt, many others. You won’t find their addresses on their websites. They really only want contact with their customers when and how it suits them. In some cases, the only way to contact them electronically is via their formal Complaint contact. Perhaps we should all use that?
I suggest that it should be a legal requirement for any business that has a web presence to have an email contact, just as they would a postal address and phone number.
I wanted some information on AirNZ Skycouch offering and the booking process. Not finding it on their website I tried ringing but gave up after many minutes on hold. How hard can email be for something so simple and no urgency, yet? Well, they do not publish an email address but have an online form. The information demanded by the form assume the only people who will ever contact AirNZ have flown already or have tickets, and it wants ticket numbers, name of the pax, dates, flight number and so on. You could not make that up (but I did make up enough to get the form to submit).
I got an automated response after a few minutes - We have received your enquiry and we will endeavour to respond within 7 - 10 business days.
The human’s response came a month (4 weeks!) later. It was a non-answer that avoided my question while telling me how good Skycouch and AirNZ are and I will learn about the booking process as I buy tickets, but seemingly no understanding that if a Skycouch is not available or is too dear I don’t want to buy a ticket, so wanted to know if and how I could get prices and availability for the Skycouch in the fares search.
As I posted elsewhere, you cannot force a company to answer the phone, and now add answer email, or even acknowledge email, or answer questions. Therein lies a problem.
Many large businesses these days want to communicate with us electronically. But has anyone noticed how difficult it is to email these companies. For example, try emailing a simple question to Coles or Flybuys or Telstra and, no doubt, many others. You won’t find their addresses on their websites. They really only want contact with their customers when and how it suits them. In some cases, the only way to contact them electronically is via their formal Complaint contact. Perhaps we should all use that?
I suggest that it should be a legal requirement for any business that has a web presence to have an email contact, just as they would a postal address and phone number.
I had $200 withdrawn from my account without permission by a US vendor i used previously. Because i had dealt with them before the bank was useless, couldnt do a thing until the money had been cleared and taken, then i had to follow some dispute procedure to lodge a complaint etc…
Screw that, I rang the company in America fully expecting no satisfaction… money back in account 3 days later. Thanks for nothing Aus.
Unfortunately they also need to push those emails thru to their call centres, otherwise they are lucky to be checked once a day.
Email can be good when it’s a complex issue being explained or a written records serves best but for speed talking to someone will usually resolve most issues quicker and before they escalate.
For a service country as we are becoming, we certainly suck at the service part of that. Customers are what makes ur business thrive, enables those employed to keep being paid… Not some waste of time detracting the powers that be from playing at big business.
