I recently had the misfortune of flying from NZ to the UK. I say misfortune only because it’s something like a 30 hour trip – in Economy class. (enough said)
Sadly things went progressively down hill when Air Malaysia annouced (2 hours past the specified boarding time, and well after everyone had checked in and cleared customs) that a part was missing and therefore the aircraft would not be flying. And no – they didn’t know when the new part would be arriving exactly. (Why they hadn’t spotted that a part was missing earlier is anyones guess.)
As you can imagine – chaos ensued as 300 odd people, all flying via KL with onward connecting flights, approached the customer services desk in some kind of mass stampede. And at this point I must admit I had an enormous amount of sympathy for those poor soles having to bear the brunt of customer outrage!
The thing is – we ALL have some horrible airline story to tell. So this is nothing new. And that’s exactly the point! Why are the airlines not learning these lessons? You would think that by now there would be a well formulated and slick plan that they would naturally fall back on in events like this? But no .. it was just all chaos and confusion.
And the thing that made it worse is that I had to phone them to find out what had happened with my connecting flight. It was as if they didn’t care at all. I wonder if this is how they treat all their customers – or just those in economy class?
It’s not the delays that really bothered me in the end … but how they treated me.
I think we must almost have enough airline stories now to write a whole book>