Sep 14 2011
Days and Nights — Ethics in Business
In January, CBC reported that Sunwing Vacations consistently mislead their costumers to believe that they paid for an eight-day stay in Mexico, but did not provide accommodations for the final night. Travellers slept in the hotel lobby or paid extra, and were not aware of this until after they have landed in Mexico. The agency explained that the first night spent the plane counted for one of the advertised “eight.”
Sunwing’s arrangements disappointed many. While they tried to explain it away with as a play of words, both the agency and the hotel had taken care to ensure that the costumers wouldn’t find out ahead of time. The travellers couldn’t see their check-out times on the internet and the hotel cleaned up evidence of the night in the lobby before the next batch of travellers arrived.
Sunwing damaged not only its own reputation. Discussion in the Comment section showed that readers connected this incident to experiences with various travelling agencies. This unfortunately reinforced the stereotype that profitable organizations will resort to unethical measures to make money – unethical behaviour of one business cast an unfavourable impression on the entire industry.
Reference: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/01/03/bc-sunwingpackage.html
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