Good to see opt out ending

The Herald reports:

Jetstar has agreed to drop the use of pre-selected ‘opt-out’ services when selling airline tickets online after the Commerce Commission concluded there were grounds to prosecute the Qantas Airways subsidiary under the Fair Trading Act.

The airline had held out as other companies fell into line with the regulator last year, including rival Air New Zealand, House of Travel, Dash Tickets, Ticket Direct and Naked Bus. Consumer NZ had also campaigned to end the practice. The use of pre-ticked boxes in online booking forms added extras that some travellers may not have wanted, such as insurance.

Good to see this ending. People are quite capable of ticking the extras they want. By pre-selecting them, airlines have been relying on people not noticing they are ticked (quite easy to do) and making money by people buying services they don’t actually want. That is profit making through deception, not through offering an actual service that is valued and people want to pay for.

So good to see this practice stopping.