Fly me to the moon - just don't charge me the earth!
By: Scarlett (12 December 2008)
You know something, this airline I’m about to go off on one about used to be a great little budget airline. Let’s call them ‘Fly-on-air’ okay? We use them a few times a year. They were our first choice for hopping between London and Sweden and for city-breaks Europe-wide. After the latest debacle though, I can say with the utmost certainty that in future I will gnaw my own leg off before EVER booking a flight with them again.
I should have heeded the warning signs, but you know how the ‘Halo Effect’ works – and I had been so pleasantly surprised with the quality of their aircrafts and the amount of leg room in the past, that I didn’t want to acknowledge it was all changing. I was not in the least bothered about no seat allocation, or paying for snacks and drinks. These were short, snappy flights and if I couldn’t remember to pop a packet of Maltesers in my pocket and bring a bottle of water with me, then I deserved to have to pay £12 for a wine gum didn’t I? I’m big on personal responsibility.
The first sign should have been that suddenly instead of having to fork out for extra baggage, you had to pay for any bags at all. That’s not on really is it? But it didn’t annoy me overmuch because we normally travel pretty light and can manage with backpacks which you can take on with you. The next cheeky charge was the online booking fee. What the...? Don’t normal companies award discounts to customers who organise their own purchases online? Not ‘Fly-on-air’ I’m afraid. And that wasn’t all. There seemed to be charge piled upon charge piled upon charge. So much so - that a trip costing £1 outbound and £14 return quickly added up to over £90. It must have been the tax on travelling on a day with a ‘y’ in it, or the extra fees that accumulated for having small brains. They really saw us coming, didn’t they?
Never mind, in the grand scheme of things ninety quid isn’t a great deal and now my other half can sit back safe in the knowledge that his advent sojourn to the land of icicles is all booked up well in advance, two months in fact – so he can book his days off work accordingly, wrap up the pressies and forget about everything til the 19th December when he shows up at Stansted. Right? Wrong, oh how wrong!
About three weeks ago he received an email from the airline explaining that his outbound flight had been cancelled and he’d been reallocated another flight. Fair enough I hear you say, these things happen. His original flight was going out very early in the morning so he’d have a full day in Sweden. The replacement flight was leaving at 7 pm. Not only did this mean he’d be losing a day of his holiday, it also meant a day off work wasted and the hassles of getting to Stansted through the rush hour traffic instead of the nice quiet time he’s envisaged. We decided to check online to see whether this was the only flight leaving on that day and what do you know – there was an available flight 2 hours after the one that had been cancelled with seats to spare. Why hadn’t the airline simply shunted his booking onto this one instead? That would’ve made sense wouldn’t it, being the next available flight? Let’s see, could it be because that flight was peak demand and relatively expensive, whereas the evening flight was cheap as chips. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out whose interests were being served by the change, does it? Then again, maybe it makes no odds, because my other half actually used to be a rocket scientist – and he didn’t see that one coming.
We were absolutely furious. Furious with the underhand way we felt they’d dealt with the flight change, furious that it’d been changed at all, furious there was no customer service number to call. So we decided that rather than lose a day’s holiday when he was only going out for three days in the first place, we’d just suck it up and rebook him on the next flight – which although quite pricey, made sense on all levels.
The email had stated that if he wasn’t happy with the reallocation, he could cancel it and apply for a refund, so yippee, we could get our £1 back (plus charges) and put that towards the £80 the new single leg cost. Suddenly, a trip he’s purchased for an advertised cost of £15 and paid £90 for was now going to cost £170 less whatever he got back in refund. He held his temper, thought of the greater good and coughed up the dosh, cancelled the evening flight out and sat back secure in the knowledge that he could dream of his white Swedish Christmas, wrap up the pressies and forget about everything til the 19th December when he shows up at Stansted. Right? Wrong again, oh how wrong!
Last week he got another email. The airline had now cancelled the flight back and reallocated him onto an earlier flight. I only knew about this when he called me from work almost exploding. He never calls from work. If he’d severed a limb rescuing a cat from a chain saw he’d tell me when he got home. He’s not a drama-lover. He’s a calm bloke, even tempered, cool as a... well erupting volcano might possibly come close to describing it. I gathered little from his first apoplectic splutters apart from there was news about his flight to impart – then listened in disbelief as the latest saga unfolded. The new flight was a few hours earlier than the one he’d chosen, again cutting his holiday time down. It wasn’t a full ten hours difference like the earlier [s]scam[/s] change, but it still screwed with his plans and created a nuisance.
We checked online again, resigned to having to buy another ticket back if there was one closer to his preferred timings. In this case there wasn’t, however, and ‘Fly-on-air’ had put him on the next available plane. This fact accepted, he decided there was nothing to do other than click ‘okay’ for the revised booking which would confirm he accepted their change. Did you think things would be so straightforward – think again buster.
The problem was that the booking cited included his reallocated flight out (which he had cancelled and rebooked remember) so by clicking okay, he would effectively be accepting the unsatisfactory change to the outward leg, possibly negating any claim for a refund. We are suspicious like that. We’ve been burned in the past. So not knowing what to do, he decided to phone customer services and ask them to sort the whole damn mess out. You’d think the worst that could happen would be we’d get stuck in the hell that is call centre queuing. Think again. In actual fact, the worst that could happen was that there would be no customer service telephone numbers on their web site at all. There was a fax number and email and that was it!
Luckily for me I am in Blackadder’s words ‘As cunning as a fox who has just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University!’ and I was certain that before they had reached this nadir of craposity, they’d have dealt with telephone calls. So I Googled them. Bingo! Found the number for their UK customer services and watched on as other half took a deep breath and prepared for battle.
Surprisingly, he got through to a real person, not a menu, not a queue - a living, breathing individual who listened and then gave him articulate, helpful and informative responses. She cancelled the flight he had already cancelled (which hadn’t registered as cancelled on their system) and promptly started the refund rolling. She then okayed his reorganised homebound flight and checked everything was correct with his separately booked outward leg before bidding him adieu. If she’d appeared to him in person shortly afterwards I swear he’d have married her (if I hadn’t beaten him to it!) So we had a happy ending after all. Thankful as we are for this conclusion, we still think the shitty policies and excess fees stink and will not be putting any more of our business in their hands. Next time you’re tempted by a £1 flight, ask yourself what price sanity.
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