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Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Something You Need To Know About AirAsia

I went into AirAsia's website and they are proclaiming these taglines to the whole wide world :-

1) AirAsia awarded Best Asian Low-Cost Carrier bt TTG
2) AirAsia is the 3rd largest brand in Malaysia & Tony Fernandes is Top CEO brand
3) World's Best New Airline 2008, TheBudgies World Low Cost Airline

It's good to give recognition when it's due and once it's given, well....maintain it.

I'm not a frequent flyer, but I love to check out AirAsia's and MAS promotion. More to AirAsia's because they have good deals and their website is more user-friendly than MAS. When I do fly, my first choice will be AirAsia's, well, not so much of the comfort but more because of the discounts. :)

Having said that, and experiencing flights with AirAsia these past few years, I have come to a conclusion that AirAsia's standards are dropping way too fast.

I had some trouble when I helped book more than 20 air-tickets with AirAsia to Kota Kinabalu last year. A group of us were going to cilmb Mt Kinabalu, the highest peak in South East Asia and we had to be at Kota Kinabalu at a certain time. AirAsia changed our flight without informing me. I accidentally found out when I wanted to book a new climber on the same flight. I called the Airlines and it took about 6 minutes before I could speak to someone.

This year, a group of my friends are planning to climb Mt Kinabalu again. In January, Messner (one of the organisers) helped to book the flight tickets for some of them.

The flight AK5110 was scheduled to leave LCCT-KL at 10:30AM on the 18th of March 2009.

A few weeks later, AirAsia had moved the flight to 7.30pm without informing Messner. It was also by chance that he (and I) saw it because someone wanted to go on the same flight and noticed that the flight at 10.30 was no longer in the website. Immediately I emailed Messner asking him to reconfirm his flight online and if it was true that they have changed it, he should call them and change it to the earliest flight available.

He did call AirAsia the next day, but after 20 minutes of waiting for a customer service officer to attend to his call, he gave up. He called me to complain and I guess it was nice to hear my voice after 20 minutes of waiting for AirAsia to pick up his call.... haha. He said he wanted to kick somebody (I'm surprised he said that because he's not one who loses his temper so quickly) and thank God I wasn't next to him. :)

He managed to get through to AirAsia the day after and got booked into the 10:20am flight.

Note to AirAsia - please do something about your after sales services.

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