Email to Jetstar Advocacy Manager, Jetstar CEO and Qantas CEO

While you advised that you will not respond to this note, I thought I would nevertheless try one more time to explain our concerns:
1) We agree that customer choice is useful, but informed choice requires full price disclosure.
2) In our case we were provided with 2 documents (ticket, and a check-in reminder) that clearly presented the pre-paid baggage prices (as well as a few somewhat higher pre-airport prices) under the heading “To view baggage fees applicable for your flight, please see below”.
3) In the prices shown below this title, there were exactly zero prices presented for at-airport payment.
4) Note that the title did not refer to “some” of the baggage fees, or advise that at-airport fees could be found elsewhere. The logical interpretation of this title is that all of the applicable baggage fees for our flight were presented below.
5) While you correctly state that we could have found the at-airport prices in a link provided, the link carried the title, “To view other fees applicable to your flight visit our our fees and charges page.”
6) Since we weren’t interested in anything other than baggage fees, and the applicable baggage fees for our flight were “shown below”, we didn’t open the link and didn’t see the extreme (over 600%) price escalations Jetstar would impose at the airport.
7) In short, Jetstar documentation on baggage fees was highly misleading and most likely deliberately so. It appears likely that Jetstar deliberately held back the extremely high at-airport prices with the express hope that their passengers would be unaware of the extreme price escalations that would be imposed at the airport.
8) In other words Jetstar’s baggage fee documentation looks to be a careful Bait and Switch trap intended to force unsuspecting customers to pay extreme baggage fees.
9) If Jetstar is unwilling to reasonably engage with us on this issue, we’ll take our case to the court of public opinion.

International
Australia-Sydney
United States-Honolulu

Comments

Just a quick point of

Just a quick point of clarification. Jetstar has 3 separate price categories for carrying baggage:
1) "Pre-paid" prices if you pay at the time of booking your ticket. These reasonably-priced fees are proudly attached to tickets and check-in notifications, and in our case carried the title, "To view baggage fees applicable for your flight, please see below."
2) "Pre-paid after booking but before airport" prices that are some-what more expensive. In our case they presented a few of these prices in the ticket and check-in notification. It is interesting to note, however, that the prices presented were only for baggage weights of 5kg, 30kg, 35kg and 40kg. They presented no pricing in the typical baggage weights of 15 - 25 kg ... perhaps to avoid attracting unwanted attention?
3) "At-airport" prices that for our flight (Sydney to Honolulu) were up to 1000% above the "Pre-Paid" fees at time of booking. In our case these at-airport prices were far from obvious, and were hidden behind a link titled "To view other fees applicable for your flight visit our fees and charges page."

From our perspective this very different presentation of baggage fees does not live up to a reasonable duty of care to properly inform customers about Jetstar baggage fees, and in fact would appear to be an attempt to "encourage" unsuspecting passengers to pay very high prices for baggage transport. In our case, they were very successful.