Airline promotion passes ‘anti-competitive’ test

A posse of airline cargo staff have been up in arms about an opposition carrier’s sales promotion – which they suspected of possibly “bordering on consumer malpractice and/or anticompetitive behaviour”. This was one of those nowadays common incentive promotions – suggesting that, if you maintained or bettered your normal air cargo volumes with the airline, you stood a chance of winning a big prize. With the Consumer Protection Bill having taken on a whole new meaning, the complainants wondered if the consumer could be said to be getting a fair deal under such a circumstance. If the importer/exporter customer is expecting his freight forwarding agent to make the best choice of carrier, and the forwarder has an airline on a promo path dangling big cash sums or vouchers in front of his nose, the complainants asked FTW: “Is his judgment going to be in the interest of the customer? “Would it not be consumer malpractice or anticompetitive?” As usual in the case of such a legal conundrum, FTW went off immediately to telephonically pick the brain of a legal eagle in the field of freight and trade – and tossed the puzzler before Shane Dwyer, head of the shipping department at Durban lawyers, Shepstone & Wylie. “Mmmm,” he mused. “Might have faced a bit of a problem in the old days, under the Gaming Act, where you weren’t allowed to offer an incentive – and then put the names in a hat. “But that’s not the case nowadays.” From the point of view of the Competition Act, Dwyer was even more brief. “It doesn’t contravene the Competition Act,” he told FTW. Indeed, he suggested it might actually be viewed the opposite way – that it was good, competitive practice for an airline battling for business in these tough times. “If it gets them more cargo than normal I’d say that it’s a pretty good idea,” Dwyer said. “And, if they want to be competitive, the only thing for other airlines to do would be to come up with a good promotion of their own.”