They state it was the Australian site, and they would be very careful that they have picked the AU site as the ACCC would hate to lose over something so silly.
Anyone would hate to lose over something quite silly, but this
is the ACCC we are talking about here...
There are two things at play, the first is that if they advertise $99 fares, a general member of the public MUST be able to find a $99 which will take them to KUL. Furthermore there must be a reasonable number of $99 fares released over the time period that these fares are offered so that a general member of the public has a reasonable chance of purchasing a flight at the quoted price.
This one has been brought up time and time again for a while. It applies any time there is a sale, viz. whether it be a regular sale (e.g. Qantas or Virgin regular domestic sales) or a super sale (e.g. new route).
This argument is a bit dubious on both sides, especially for a super sale, as it is very difficult to ascertain what is an unreasonable number of fares, and given that many people may have rushed the AAX site upon release of these fares, it is quite easy to make a case of "reasonable"/"unreasonable" for both sides. For example, for a start, AAX may claim that it did release quite a number of seats but they were booked very fast, so people even 24 hours later may have eventually heard of the sale but found there were simply no more seats. Consumers may argue that since AAX should've reasonably expected that everyone would jump on a $99 fare, they should release proportionately more seats to compensate for a reasonable passenger booking a ticket in a reasonable timeframe (i.e. arguing that a few hours is
not reasonable). And so on.
On the premise that the article elaborated further about something about ancilliary charges and not this note, I was tending that this aforementioned was not the problem (although it might be, i.e. this was the problem but instead the complaint manifested as being not including the full amount of charges).
As far as evidence goes, they could get that off the AirAsia website, make some dummy bookings, and do searches over every day of the promotional period. Wouldn't take too long to do that either.
You would need to get some good logs to show historical evidence that on a certain date or time frame, AAX did something wrong (or conversely). I'd imagine screenshots might end up being very circumstantial in court. Same thing with random searching, especially if in court they are not fully qualified (what did you search, when did you execute the search relative to the start of the sale, which dates did you search for flights, etc.)
I'd imagine AAX wouldn't engage in tactics to cover up if it was in the wrong, but electronic evidence is dubious at best (though that again can work for and against both sides of the argument in an admittedly dinosaur legal system).
