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Ministry of Consumer Protection questions the prepayment principle for air travel

2022-08-22T19:25:24.636Z


Flight tickets still have to be paid for in full when booking. Now the Ministry of Consumer Protection is open to a change. But the plans met with resistance.


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Scoreboard with canceled flights: Consumers should be better protected

Photo: Andreas Arnold/DPA

When the flight is cancelled, consumers often have to fight for reimbursement of the ticket costs.

But that could be an end in the future: Consumer advocates have long been demanding that air passengers no longer have to pay the full ticket price when booking.

At the weekend, the state of Lower Saxony, which is governed by the SPD and CDU, adopted the initiative of the Federal Association of Consumer Organizations (VZBV) against prepayment with a Federal Council initiative - and now there is also tailwind from the green-led Federal Ministry for the Environment and Consumer Protection.

The airlines and their associations oppose this.

"Passengers are tired of giving the airlines interest-free loans, being left with the costs of canceled flights or, in the worst case, having to bear the risk of insolvency," said VZBV mobility expert Marion Jungbluth to the "Handelsblatt".

The federal government is being asked to reform the prepayment practice.

In the future, payment should only be made at check-in.

A spokesman for Consumer Protection Minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) said on Monday that the airlines have a duty to make refunds, compensation payments and compensation payments quickly and unbureaucratically in the event of justified claims.

If this does not work, the advance payment practice will be reviewed.

However, there are three judgments by the Federal Court of Justice, which declared the advance payment principle of the airlines to be legal in 2016.

According to the federal judges, consumers are adequately protected by the EU passenger regulation and the risk of insolvency is kept within limits by state controls.

Possible interest rate disadvantages for customers are regularly offset by price advantages for early bookings.

But times have changed since then, say the consumer advocates, who are now pushing for a change in the law: Only a short time after the BGH ruling, thousands of customers of the insolvent Air Berlin were left with their ticket costs until further notice, followed by the chaos summer of 2018 and Finally, the Corona shock in March 2020. Hundreds of thousands of tickets were canceled all of a sudden, the Lufthansa Group switched off automated refunds so as not to fall straight into bankruptcy due to the outflow of customer funds in the billions.

Massive problems at airports

The air traffic system pretty much botched the restart this summer.

A lack of workers at the airports and in the jets led to underground punctuality values, so that Lufthansa alone had to cancel around 7,000 flights in Munich and Frankfurt in order to stabilize the system.

From mid-May to mid-July, more than 258,000 passengers were affected by flight cancellations at NRW airports, as reported by the state government in Düsseldorf on request.

They all allegedly had the right to a refund of the ticket price within seven days and to compensation payments of between 250 and 600 euros under the EU Air Passenger Directive 261, which takes effect from a delay of three hours.

According to the “Handelsblatt”, the number of cases at the arbitration board for public transport (SÖP) has also more than doubled.

"In practice, the law doesn't work," Helga Zander-Hayat from the North Rhine-Westphalia Consumer Center is convinced.

A Lufthansa spokeswoman countered: “Despite the many flight plan changes, we are making the refunds almost completely within the specified period of just seven days.

In this respect there is no reason for this political initiative.«

The industry association BDL argues that advance payment is common internationally and also in other service sectors.

»The airlines receive planning security through the advance payment and can optimally utilize their aircraft, which is positive for the climate.

In return, they can offer their customers attractive early bird discounts,” says BDL CEO Matthias von Randow.

»An end to advance payment would mean that the tickets would become more expensive: the risk of default would have to be included, allocated to all tickets and thus co-financed.«

Ministry of Transport is skeptical

The Ministry of Transport is skeptical about Lower Saxony's initiative.

The proposal will be examined, said a spokesman for Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) to the "Handelsblatt".

In principle, however, the federal government is striving for an EU-wide solution because national regulations are being circumvented and could lead to competitive disadvantages.

Lars Watermann from the passenger rights portal »EUflight.de« does not believe in the healing effect of abolishing prepayment.

“Not a single irregular flight would be more punctual or not canceled as a result.

It would rather reinforce the trend that flights are canceled when the load is too low.« In his opinion, the airlines can only be grabbed by even higher compensation payments.

In any case, there is more to the background than that.

Despite the summer of breakdowns, the Czech Republic may want to deal with the issue of air passenger rights again this year in the Council of the European Union.

As early as 2013, the EU Commission had proposed, among other things, only triggering the claims for compensation that had existed since 2004 after five hours and also introducing new "reasons for release" for which the airlines would not have to pay.

In this discussion, it is important to collect arguments and points in good time

mic/dpa-AFX

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2022-08-22

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