Unfair Terms and Conditions in E-Commerce: Special References to Online Booking of Accommodation Contracts

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Farihana Binti Abdul Razak, Zuhairah Ariff Abd. Ghadas

Abstract

There are five major market segments in e-commerce, namely Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Consumer (B2C), Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C), Consumer-to-Business (C2B) and Business-to-Government (B2G). Some researcher includes Mobile-Commerce (M-Commerce) as an e-commerce segment, while the most recent e-commerce introduces is Social-Commerce (S-Commerce). One of the industries that use e-commerce extensively in the tourism business and booking accommodation online is one of the most common features of today’s way of vacationing. In online booking of accommodation, the standard terms and standard form contracts are generally used to legalize the transactions and consumers have to agree all the standard terms prior to payment and finalizing the transaction. Such a mechanism is prone to the inclusion of unfair contract terms.Unfair contract terms are terms which may unfairly exclude or limit liabilities in a contract and such terms are legal and binding if agreed and accepted by the contractual parties. In Malaysia, the unfair contract terms are not regulated under the Contracts Act 1950 but the Consumer Protection Act 1999 (Part IIIA) have provisions which protects consumer against unfair contract terms.This paper adopts qualitative and doctrinal research to examine the principles, application and effort of unfair contract terms in online booking of accommodation agreement and discuss whether the existing provision in CPA 1999 are sufficient to protect consumers against unfair terms in accommodation’s online booking contracts. For the purpose of discussion in this paper, references are only made to online terms and contract used by Agoda and Booking.com.

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