Moldova Fights for Passenger Rights in Airline Crisis
The Government has favourably reviewed the draft law initiated by several members of Parliament that allows citizens to recover their money more quickly for unused airline tickets from bankrupt airlines.
This law was drafted specifically in response to the situation of dozens of passengers being unable to recover their money for tickets purchased last year from Air Moldova, stressed the Minister of Economic Development and Digitalization, Dumitru Alaiba.
“Through this opinion, we support the initiative to amend the insolvency law to provide consumers with better protection when airlines enter insolvency proceedings by placing consumer claims in a higher rank. The legislative initiative aims to facilitate the recovery of the cost of airline tickets for consumers affected by the inability of air carriers to pay. We have a specific case concerning “Air Moldova” for which this initiative was also developed,” said Dumitru Alaiba.
To clarify, the project was voted on in its first reading by Parliament at the end of last month. The authors of the initiative mention that, currently, about 30,000 people cannot recover money spent on Air Moldova tickets purchased in 2023. This represents 75,000 tickets totaling approximately 9 million euros.
It is worth mentioning that during the past year, Air Moldova repeatedly cancelled a number of flights, citing a lack of fleet as the reason. At the same time, the company announced an extensive restructuring process in order to avoid bankruptcy and to return the accumulated debts, which would amount to 2 billion lei.
Translation by Iurie Tataru
