The Federal Consumer Attorney’s Office ( Profeco ) urges Aeroméxico to eliminate from its online ticket sales platform the automatic charge of travel insurance that appears in the final price of the ticket, without the consumer having previously requested it.
The call is due to the fact that the airline has failed to attend to a precautionary measure to eliminate this charge, said the head of Profeco, Dr. Ricardo Sheffield, reporting that said commercial practice has been eliminated from the aviation market worldwide, and in Mexico only Aeroméxico applies it.
The prosecutor assured that in the European Union and in the United States it was determined that this practice was illegal; recalled that in the old continent there were airlines that had to return two or three years of the collection of that insurance to their clients, while in our neighbor to the north the problem was corrected immediately, so there was no requirement to compensate the consumers.
He said that many passengers do not need the insurance or do not want it, and end up buying it because of the cybernetic deception to which they are subjected.
On domestic flights the charge for travel insurance is 359.00 pesos, and on international flights it is 416.00.
Ricardo Sheffield explained that Aeroméxico collects the insurance through an opt-out process, in which the extra appears charged without the consent of the consumer, constituting an abusive practice. He pointed out that it is different when the buyer is given the option of choosing an extra or not, through an opt-in process that consists of requesting prior and voluntary consent, expressly granted by checking a box.
“Aeroméxico, yes or yes, has to remove the opt-out, as all the airlines in the world did,” said the attorney, considering that it seems that the determination of this airline is that, as long as there is no court order, “let’s keep abusing as much as we can.”
“They (the airline) know that everything they get, from now on they will have to end up returning it,” he established.
The attorney warned that Profeco will exhaust all available legal mechanisms and instances to curb this abuse of consumers.
