They ask Aeroméxico to eliminate abusive charges for travel insurance. (THE CENTURY OF TORREÓN
The Federal Consumer Attorney’s Office (Profeco) urged 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 comply with a precautionary measure to eliminate this charge, reported Profeco, reporting that said commercial practice has been eliminated from the aviation market worldwide, and in Mexico only Aeroméxico applies it.
He pointed out that in the European Union and in the United States, this practice was determined to be illegal; He 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 the 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 pesos, and on international flights 416 pesos.
Profeco explained that Aeroméxico charges the insurance through an opt-out process, in which the extra appears charged without the consumer’s consent, 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.
The agency indicated that Aeroméxico, “yes or yes”, has to remove the opt-out, as all airlines in the world have removed it.
Profeco reported that it will exhaust all available legal mechanisms and instances to stop this abuse of consumers.