The Australian Consumer Law, Schedule 2 to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, is the national regime governing misleading conduct, unfair contract terms and consumer guarantees. Enforced by the ACCC, it is the instrument that regulates Australian travel — as distinct from the Consumer Data Right, which governs data portability and was never extended to the sector.
Australian Consumer Law
Statute Australia
The ACL is Australia’s general-purpose consumer statute, and in travel it has been used hard. The ACCC pursued Trivago over hotel-ranking practices that presented paid placement as best value, resulting in a A$44.7 million penalty. It pursued Qantas over the sale of tickets on flights already cancelled, resulting in a A$100 million penalty settlement.
- Conduct, not data - misleading representations, unfair contract terms, consumer guarantees. Nothing in the ACL requires a machine-readable interface or a portability right.
- Economy-wide - it applies to travel because it applies to everything, not because anyone designed a travel regime.
- Enforced by penalty - the ACCC’s instrument is litigation after the fact.
Why this entry matters: the control group
Australia is the cleanest natural experiment in the API Evangelist sector series, and this statute is the reason.
The same country designated banking under the Consumer Data Right in 2019 and energy in 2022. Both sectors were measured in this series and both produced machine-readable markets: mandated schemas, shared resource names, documents that compete and still match. Travel was never designated. Same country, same Treasury, same regulator, same firms, same engineering labour market — one variable different, and the ACL is what travel got instead.
The State of Australian Travel APIs measured the result. Contract quality of 5.8 out of 100, with nine of eleven organizations at zero — the lowest contract-quality reading in the entire research programme, across every sector and every market measured, and a figure that survived a full rubric revision untouched. Seventeen specifications from a single publisher, and nothing shared with anyone.
The instrument works on its own terms and produces nothing on this one. The ACCC extracted A$144.7 million in travel penalties from two companies, and the market it disciplined publishes less machine-readable evidence than any other measured. Enforcement against misconduct and legibility to machines are unrelated outcomes, and a regulator equipped only for the first will not deliver the second.
The corollary is the useful part for anyone forecasting this sector: if the CDR is ever extended to travel — booking history, loyalty balances, itinerary data — the numbers in that report become obsolete within three years. That is not speculation about travel. It is what the two designated Australian sectors already did.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This regulation shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this regulation in the context of a real sector.
The State of Australian Travel APIs
The instrument Australia used on travel instead of the Consumer Data Right — A$44.7m against Trivago, A$100m against Qantas, and contract quality of 5.8 with nine of eleven organizations at zero.
