Consumers in the UK will no longer be subjected to paying excessive fees for bookings such as flights, cinemas and hotels. The UK government has implemented an immediate ban beginning on Saturday April 6, protecting British consumers from paying unfair credit and debit card transactions fees placed by some businesses, reported BBC News.
For years, many businesses were adding extra fees to consumer card purchases. Most of these fees were added on booking transactions, such as flight tickets, concerts, trains, hire cars and theatre tickets. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) released that consumers were being charged about 50 pence over for each transaction. In 2010, the government reported that the airlines industry alone made up to £350 million in card charges.
Jo Swinson, the consumer affairs minister, told BBC News, “The practice of excessive payment surcharges has been ripping off consumers for far too long. They are fed up of thinking they will be paying a certain price for goods, only to find out towards the end of the process that the final price is much higher.”
British consumers were not happy with these charges, as over 500,000 people supported the campaign to put an end to these extra charges. According to the new ban, businesses are to charge only the actual fee it costs them to make the payment transaction. The ban was enforced immediately, but small and startup retailers are exempt from the ban until June 2014. Some other companies that are also exempt from the ban are other financial, healthcare, property and social services. Though the ban is in effect, Richard Lloyd, executive director of Which? (which first raised the surcharge concern), warned that consumers must keep watchful of the businesses that try to dismiss the ban.
Lloyd told BBC news, “For it to be effective, there must be a tough enforcement regime and companies must play fair and not pass costs on to customers in other ways. We will be monitoring the ban closely and want people to tell us about surcharges they think are excessive.”
To read more about the U.K.’s card charging ban, click on the full Guardian story here.
