Excessive surcharges at flug.de?

May an online travel portal freely decide on surcharges that consumers have to pay when using certain payment methods? The Consumer Centre Baden-Württemberg considered this to be anticompetitive and issued a cease-and-desist notice to the travel portal flug.de.

The flight broker flug.de, operated by flug.de Flugreisen GmbH, charged a surcharge of more than EUR 30.00 for booking flight tickets if customers wanted to pay for their booked flights with certain credit cards. Users were offered only the company's own credit card flug.de MasterCard GOLD or the not very widely used debit card "Visa Electron" as free payment methods.

The Consumer Centre Baden-Württemberg (VZBW) considered these additional fees to be anticompetitive, issued a cease-and-desist notice to the travel portal flug.de and demanded that it issue a binding declaration of discontinuance subject to a penalty clause.

flug.de rejected this, as it saw no disadvantage to its customers through the additional fees. The payment terms were therefore not adjusted accordingly.

The VZBW therefore sued the travel portal operator flug.de for an injunction before the Regional Court (LG) Aschaffenburg.

Court decision on flug.de's fee practice

As the VZBW stated in a press release, the Regional Court (LG) Aschaffenburg held in its judgment (Az. 1 HK O 66/15) that the surcharges for the use of certain payment methods constituted a clear disadvantage to consumers and thus were anticompetitive.

The court decided that companies may only charge consumers for costs that actually arise for them through the use of a particular payment method. A surcharge of over 30 euros was, in the view of the judges, excessive and thus impermissible.

The judgment is not yet final; the company flug.de Flugreisen GmbH announced that it would appeal against the judgment.

Conclusion on the question of surcharges in online bookings

The Regional Court (LG) Aschaffenburg considers surcharges for the use of certain payment methods to be unfair if these surcharges have not actually been incurred by the portal operator. Should the appellate court agree with this legal position, many an online portal would probably have to change its fee practice.