Air Asia - Now everyone can Fly with difficulties‏

Me and my group of friends travel very frequently, be it a family trip or a friends trip, it would be at least twice per year either locally or internationally.


Our last trip was a disappointment with Air Asia service.... What ever had happened happened.. So what else can we do but wrote a letter of complaint to Air Asia.


We wrote the following to Air Asia's customer service and even to Tony Fernandez.


"Hello,

My recent trip to Vientiane on Air Asia with 3 friends ended with much disappointment in Air Asia’s level of service and professionalism in meeting customer’s satisfaction.

During our check-in at Wattay International Airport on 21 Oct 2008, we were being asked the question “Do you have any alcohol/perfume?” We, being honest, replied that we have 3 bottles of mulberry juice wine, a typical Lao organic farm product. However, much to our dismay and amazement, we were told strictly no alcohol allowed to be checked in!

After much exchange with the local officer, Mr Anolak Kingsada of Wattay International Airport, we were given only the following solutions:
-Sell the wine back to the duty free shop (Why would I want to do that when it is meant as a souvenir to family and friends?)
-Leave it in the airport to be claimed within a month before it is being disposed (You are expecting us to travel back to Vientiane again?)

I must say that solutions are not customer oriented. We even offered the organic farm telephone number to verify the content of the bottles. But the officer is not willing to cooperate to provide us a win-win solution.

We also suggested clarifying this item with the KL head office. This was only accepted after much debate. In Mr Anolak Kingsada’s office, we called back to the KL head office. We would also like to clarify this point with KL’s officers but was not allowed to speak directly to them by Mr Anolak Kingsada. In this emergency situation, we then tried Air Asia Call Centre (603-86604343) around 10 am the same day. However, there was no answer even after 30 minutes!

Here we would like to clarify the following items:
1) What is the solution given to Air Asia’s customers who bought wine from holiday location and intend to bring it back home?
2) Is perfume not even allowed in Air Asia check in luggage?
3) Define specifically which are the limits and what type of liquid that can or cannot be checked-in. We did a check with the officer in LCCT KL (Pari Bala) and we were told that even shampoo cannot be checked in!
4) We know of other passengers with bottle of wine and yet able to check-in and board the plane since they did not declare the alcohol. What does this say about Air Asia’s level of security control? And this is an issue of discrimination to honesty!
5) What is the purpose of a call centre if there is no answer after 30 minutes? What if it was an emergency situation?
6) Is it not possible for customers to speak directly with the KL head office? Isn’t it Air Asia’s priority to clear customer’s doubts?
7) When we tried to get a clarification from your officers in LCCT, no satisfactory explanations. We were even told that liquid cannot be checked in. This is quite appalling since we also have shampoo etc checked in. It seems that your staff does not know their terms and condition and yet have the cheek to state that we have not read the document. This says much about your level of service and staff knowledge.
8) We also got some explanations from the police officers in LCCT. We were told that as long as the liquid/alcohol bottles are sealed together with receipt it can be hand carried. Why is this not offered as a solution in Laos?
9) We traveled widely with MAS, Tiger Airways and Jetstar but there is no such ruling. Why is Air Asia so special? How does Air Asia maintain its competitiveness with these airlines in terms of service? In my opinion, it is not at all at par with any of them.

I am very disappointed that this is the results of being honest. Air Asia seems to be encouraging dishonest customers and has no interest in customer’s well being. We would like Air Asia to compensate us for the losses (the mulberry juice wine & phone calls made to KL). We were told that you will reply with solutions in maximum 14 days. Hopefully this is demonstrated as claimed and hopefully we now get a satisfactory response.

If you need any additional information/receipts for your investigations, please let us know. We are very willing to assist you in any way so that a fair solution is presented.

Thank you.

Regards,
Andrea Chua
Angeline Ng
Sean Ng
Sylvia Gan "




No response from them , so we send another one to the KLIA authority.




Sent:Tuesday, 4 Nov, 2008 11: 36 PM
To:webmaster@dca.gov.my; klca@org.my
Cc: guestsupport@airasia.com;


"Dear Sir or Madam,


I am really sad and dissapointed and really do not know who should i contact for the help on below. We had sent the email below to Air Asia support email and we have waited for more than 2 weeks and yet to hear from them on the explanation on our incident that we had faced during our trip to Laos.


This is not the kind of customer service that we are expecting. We have made our complain on the spot when we arrived KLIA airport. Sadly to say that Air Asia's staff asked us to write an email to their office as they couldn't help much on our case and we did and followed what they told us but till now we haven't received any email from them.


We are definitely being overlooked and it seems that they just wanted to push us away from complaining on the spot and hoping to get away from the issue. As a consumer, we do know our rights and deserved to ask for explanation. As a passenger of the air flight, we would like to seek advice on the rules and regulations that have been implemented across world wide international flight for the incident stated below.


We are really lost now and do not know whom we should seek for help/assistance to follow up our complaint. Please do reply our email if you receive our email. At least we know that someone who is kind and responsible to follow up our case. In addition, we feel like we are been punished for being honest. Shouldn't we all been taught to be honest when we were kids? Why would we been punished but other people could escape from it? We are looking forward to hearing from you ASAP!


Thanks, Sean Ng "



I, myself forwarded the initial email to Tony Fernandez directly, unfortunately an automated generated response from the computer instead!


"Dear AirAsia Guests,


I notice that lately we have received numerous complaints on our Call Centre response time. This is due to the huge success of AirAsia X, especially with the Perth and Melbourne route announcements. These new, exciting long-haul routes have resulted in longer talk-time between callers and our agents and subsequently caused our lines to be congested.We did not anticipate this sudden surge in calls volume. However our Call Centre team headed by Sri Velayuthan has now identified and worked with our IT department to upgrade the Call Centre facility.By Nov 6, our Call Centre will have enough agents and sufficient IT infrastructure to deal with the influx. By this, we aim to improve our Call Centre performance to 90% i.e. a drop call rate of 10% only. By January, we'll be moving to a high-tech Call Centre to cater to more calls.We sincerely apologise for the frustrations caused by our Call Centre congestion but this is only due to our overwhelming business expansion. We have always been mindful in increasing cost as it will certainly lead to increasing fares. As the People's Airline, this is the last thing we want to happen.We acknowledge that technology will cost us more but at the same time we are committed to giving you excellent service. On another note, I have been working very hard with the team at AirAsia to look at reducing our fuel surcharge and you should look forward to the good news in the next couple of months.In the meantime, if you have any problems or enquiries, do not hesitate to email Sri Velayuthan (srivelayuthan@airasia.com) or Hani Mohamad (haninurlena@airasia.com). Having a combined experience of 15 years in customer service between them, they will be happy to assist you.



Best regards,Tony Fernandes"



Well, here we are with a couple of pictures of us getting ready to get drunk at the Vientiane Airport before boarding the plane!

I'm planning to send this to The Star!