In my third world country (Brazil) we actually have strict regulations on cancellations (among other consumer focused laws):
- Companies need to choose at least one channel to work 24 hours a day seven days a week.
- The consumer can only be transferred from an attendant once.
- If the call drops, the attendant must return the call and complete the service, without the customer having to repeat everything again.
- Phone calls with human service must be available for at least eight hours a day.
I'm a particular fan of the "mirror" concept, where cancelations/returna should work in the same channels and be as easy as the purchases/subscriptions.
Consumer laws here are surprisingly good in my opinion and I am also surprised on how little lobby power consumers have in developed countries, to be treated like they are, with all the black hat tactics companies throw at them.
I've been in Brazil recently and I was positively surprised with the great consumer protection laws.
One law I really liked was the "right to regret", meaning you can cancel a wide array of contracts within 7 days. For example, when booking a hotel online, no matter the hotel's cancellation policies, you can cancel a reservation within 7 days of making it.
TIL but the California laws are very limited to a subset of items which are already cancellable nationwide. For example, you can always cancel your property insurance and get a prorated refund. OP was talking about hotel reservations which are not cancellable in California. I don't know the situation is in Brazil for cell phone plans but according to the link you posted, it's not cancellable.
The funny thing about this, when there is a public conversation about their practices or legislative process to stop it, companies (i.e apple, uhg, john deer, Facebook, etc) will cry floods of tears, claim they'll go out of business due, people will lose their job, to the extra cost of compliance. They'd rather keep disadvantaged customers rather than compete and deliver value.
All of this while reporting record profits, trying to pr spin this, and throwing more money than lost with compliance at lobbyists who will lie and financially influence to the legislators.
If you say Louis Rossmann 3 times after saying Apple you'll get a long list of anti-consumer practices.
Most recently:
The issue with their charging ports being changed frequently and being non standard. They even tried to abuse the USBC standard just so they could get their charing cable lock in.
This is the surprising thing about Brazil, here we have the big corporations as well, and a lot (if not all) corrupt politicians. But somehow these consumer laws passed got approved and will be pretty hard to remove.
Yeah we follow a mirror concept, which is cancelling should be at least as easy as signing up, and ideally easier. We don't have 1 click cancellations because we don't have 1 click sign ups. It requires an hour onboarding to use our service so they have to send us an email or a message in our chat bat to trigger a cancellation so we can sure they understand all the consequences.
- Companies need to choose at least one channel to work 24 hours a day seven days a week. - The consumer can only be transferred from an attendant once. - If the call drops, the attendant must return the call and complete the service, without the customer having to repeat everything again. - Phone calls with human service must be available for at least eight hours a day.
I'm a particular fan of the "mirror" concept, where cancelations/returna should work in the same channels and be as easy as the purchases/subscriptions.
Consumer laws here are surprisingly good in my opinion and I am also surprised on how little lobby power consumers have in developed countries, to be treated like they are, with all the black hat tactics companies throw at them.