Ortiz describes consumer education and difficulty following up on complaints
Ortiz says DCWP distributed information through hotels, tourism partners, and park signage, especially during the World Cup season. He says tourists often write off scams or do not follow up, making complaints hard to action, and supports pricing clarity legislation.
Thank you for that question, Chair.
I think what we worked over the past summer, particularly in the peak of the World Cup season, was to distribute as much information out as possible to consumers and tourists regarding their rights when they're using these services.
And that included working with the Hotel Association, New York City Tourism, creating signage in New York City parks with our Parks Department colleagues.
If a tourist has an issue where that comes up, where they feel they've been scammed or overcharged, or the pricing was inaccurate based on what they received, they can bring that to us.
I think there are challenges, though, with that in the sense that a tourist, I think, unfortunately, we have a situation where tourists kind of write it off.
And unfortunately, they don't provide us all the information we need, or also when we reach out to them, they don't follow up with us.
It makes it very difficult.
And I think ideally some aspects of the legislation on today's docket would improve that pricing clarity and improve how much a consumer could be charged in the first place, which I think would be beneficial for the industry.
And even we could think of an industry where we are not just serving tourists, but we're serving New Yorkers as well.
I think that is the ultimate goal we have to have in the city for the pedicab industry.
But that would require, to your point, a stricter regime with stricter compliance measures for bad actors.