I always thought when I hit 50 years old that’d be it for the travel. I don’t have to tell you – you wait at an airport, your flight’s delayed, get on a 14-hour flight, get off, get stuck in traffic, you get to the hotel and the room service is closed.
– Brian Setzer, American Singer
There is something about AirAsia. They are consistent. Consistently late, that is.
I was in Kuching yesterday. We were supposed to board the plane, flight AK5213 departing at 9.15 pm, but as usual, it was delayed. Now in a world where everything is online, including booking, check-in and complaints, I would think they could at least send an SMS message (a commonly enough used marketing gimmick though) to us passengers ahead of time saying sorry, and telling us the exact status of the flight. But no. According to the AirAsia girl at the counter, “we made two announcements” while another chipped in with “but the announcement systems are bad so you may not have heard it”. (Slow claps)
We were waiting for a long time from 8.40 pm, which was our boarding time, (which meant we had to be at the airport way much earlier) but we stayed on until 11pm before we actually boarded the flight, and reached home at 2 am. I had expected to be at home by 11.30 pm.
Here’s the best part. AirAsia is late for almost every flight of theirs I have been booked in. I have missed meetings due to their erratic time management. It is bad enough we waste so much time getting to the airport hours earlier to go thorough immigration checks with the constant reminders by airlines TO BE ON TIME (how ironic) but to also have to factor in the almost always delays due to an inability to manage internal affairs can be very painful for someone who is always on the go.
The root problem in cases like this is just incompetence. An organisation cannot continuously be incompetent and then have a hundred excuses to give to passengers on weather and internal failures. Nobody cares because no one is paying to hear excuses why something cannot be done right. People are paying to get an uncomfortable ride with bare basic service, just to get from A to B, and that’s the least AirAsia can do.
AirAsia needs to get their act together and be there on time to pick up passengers, give them the bare minimum ride promised for the fare charged, and get them to their end destination on time.
Yesterday I just walked up to the four AirAsia ladies who were laughing and joking at the counter while we passengers were sitting dolefully wondering when we could get our tired bodies home. It has become the norm to sit and expect delays – and that is sad to see.
I asked them for a complaint letter that I wanted to write, and the name of the person in charge who takes complaints that I should address it to. Firstly, they said there was no avenue to write a complaint letter and that they can’t help. I told them they are the representatives and faces of AirAsia at that station and that they are the only connection for customer service.
They told me to go online and write my complaint in the new way that corporations hide behind incompetence, and this is not only AirAsia but many many large agencies these days – both public and private.
The Online Complaint System. The faceless, nameless, nothingness that now replaces a proper customer service.
These are as dismissive as it comes. Now how many of you love voicing out a problem, a complaint, a need to address a frustrating problem by talking to an automated machine, that makes you press a million buttons – all carefully orchestrated so that you finally give up and just shut up, and accept the lousy service or pay more for whatever else they will be selling to make that bad service better? Raise your hands now. Yeah, as I guessed. No One.
Yet corporations get away with that because people accept this. Welcome to the Industry Revolution 4.0 where large corporations give lousier service than before because now they have robotics to cover the necessity to actually face up to customers on their various incompetencies. RIP the humanising of customer service.
The consumer has stopped being king, or right these days. We are treated as nuisances if we speak up, or demand basic justification for goods or services we buy. That mindset is grounded into us in our moral studies in school – don’t rock the boat, be nice, accept the status quo, be patient. All well and good, but not when we are being ripped off.
It gets better. After half an hour, the ladies come back and tell me that AirAsia cannot divulge the name of the person in charge of complaints. Okkkk, so now now, why is there a need to hide that? Is there even a person in charge of complaints, or a Bot? However, they were kind enough to give me an empty sheet of A4 paper to write my complaints to nobody. I insisted on a name. Then the ladies told me I could Google it up myself.
What strikes me most is there is no centralised communication in a company that is organising a huge mass of transits. I kept digging and was told that the entire team there was not even from AirAsia but GTR, a third party to manage operations for the Kuching station and they of course absolved themselves of the continuous delays.
They told me to address my complaint to the station head. But no name given. The clandestine way of dealing with a mere complaint is not good at all.
Now here’s the thing, when we are late for a flight by even 15 minutes, we are punished by the plane not waiting for us, and taking off (because being on time is their main priority, you see.). But then, we are charged a hefty fine for rescheduling the flight we paid for, for us to attempt again to get to our destination. So, if we are given a penalty for being late, what is AirAsia’s penalty for being late, not even by 15 minutes which I can understand but continuously by one hour, two hours etc?
I demand a penalty for airlines that keep disrespecting consumers’ time. I demand that passengers get a discounted refund for every 30 minutes that an airline is later than the assigned time. Just like we keep paying more and more the longer we keep our cars in car parks, I don’t see why corporations should not be regulated to be fined for not keeping up to their end of the bargain. As vendors to government agencies and public companies, there is a clause in all our contracts where we pay fines if we deliver services late. Why are airlines off the hook? This should be a policy across all flights because our flights get more and more expensive but service gets worse and worse. Time to stop this.
Without severe penalties to ensure flight operators are brought to task for disrespecting consumers’ time, the new tagline will be: Now Everybody Can Cry.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
