Tiger Airways has now said sorry three times in six days, twice to angry customers, and once to the RSL.
Last Thursday it apologised for incorrectly charging some customers over the use of a baby seat.
The next day it apologised to the RSL for conducting an ANZAC DAY sale which broke the laws protecting the day from commercial exploitation.
And today it is apologising to a person who was charged twice, once on a VISA card and then on a Mastercard, for a flight, and is asking them to identify themselves so that they can get some money back.
For an airline with only five jets that started flights in November 2007 and has attracted massive negative media this sounds like someone has decided its time to stop the rot.
So we’re here to ‘help’ the Crikey way, by opening an Angry Flyers Lounge on Plane Talking. No joining fees, and only a few stale celery stalks hiding behind the soggy crackers in your typical airport lounge from hell with too few seats.
Just come in, with a valid email address, and a real complaint, and even some photos or vids of your nitty gritty airline or airport experiences, and tell the world.
Anyone caught working for another airline and planting naughty innuendos will be fed to the First Dog.
Here is today’s wrap, featuring by coincidence, nothing but Tiger Airways. (Overseas airline experiences also welcome here.)
Last Thursday’s Crikey Tips included an item from a Tiger ex-customer who was double debited for a Canberra-Melbourne fare ticket. The Tiger agent could get the payment accepted on one credit card, so tried on another, resulting in separate VISA and Mastercard debits for the same seat followed by incorrect claims that this would be fixed by Tiger staff on arrival in Melbourne.
The response from Tiger is as follows:-
Tiger Airways is a streamlined operation which is why it is able to bring Australians consistently the lowest airfares. Customers are encouraged to book their travel requirements on line to secure even better deals and to ensure they tailor their travel options to their requirements.
Double charges unfortunately occur from time to time across a wide range of personal and commercial transactions (from banks to retail outlets). It’s not common, but if a double charge occurs for Tiger Airways customers, we refund them as soon as we are aware and confirm the situation.
Tiger Airways apologises to this customer and will investigate however will need the customers name and contact details to do so.
Tiger Airways invites the customer to send a fax to 03 9335 3455 and we can call him back to discuss directly and we will rectify the situation immediately.
Today’s Tiger service failure report is from a couple who we will identify to Tiger if they give Crikey approval, as the complaint was filed on our anonymous link.
It says:-
My husband, his pensioner parents and I booked a Tiger Flight from Adelaide to Melbourne on 17th of November 2008 departing at 0725. We arrived at the airport to find the flight had been cancelled, they had not notified us despite having our 2 phone numbers, postal address and email address. Tigers ‘Conditions of Carriage’ state that if flight details change they will make every effort to contact the passengers, this obviously didn’t happen.
There were no Tiger staff at the airport to advise us what to do next, our only option was to call their Melbourne office, the number had been provided to us by an Adelaide Airport official. The official incidentally told us that they had been aware of the cancellation for over one week. We were among 40 others who were stranded. The Melbourne office of Tiger didn’t open until 9am EST, we were stranded at the airport at 6am Adelaide time. We had no option but to buy tickets on another carriers flight to Melbourne at premium airport prices.
My family had to spend $200 each to fly with Qantas nearly 3 hours after we were supposed to have departed with Tiger.
After several attempts we did manage to get through on the Tiger phone line to be told that we would receive a refund for the Tiger flights and to contact Customer Relations to discuss further refund options for the Qantas tickets. They refused to offer a reason as to why the flight had been cancelled or why we had not been notified. We have received the refund for the Tiger tickets.
We have since contacted Tiger on numerous occasions via letter and fax to discuss this matter requesting to get a refund for the Qantas tickets we had to purchase at the airport. After 4 months we received a written response which did not address any of our questions and did not even have a representatives name on it. We have received extremely poor service from Tiger and would not recommend them to anyone. They claim to be a budget carrier but in our experience they ended up costing us a lot more money.
We are still pursuing Tiger for the refund of our out of pocket expenses.
4 Comments
Tiger Airways should replace those awful A320s with B737s. Airbus seats are too cramped!
My issue with airline seats is not with the brand of aluminium tube into which they fitted but what the carrier’s offer in terms of usable room.
For example, the dimensions of the standard economy seat in an Embraer E-jet, a Boeing 777, and an Airbus A380 are within millimetres of being equally wide, and I’m a wide Australian! Each of these types offers a best sized economy seats in the sky.
But some airlines are now putting economy seats in the comfortable 9 across 777 cabins in a 10 across format, and within a year we expect to see the lower 10 across cabin and upper 8 across seating in the A380 put up to 11 and 9 across by at least one airline. Fortunately the geometry of the E-jets prevents squeezing in an extra seat.
The higher density seating found in 180 seat A320s and up to 189 seat Boeing 737-800s is totally miserable for any normal sized adult even on a short flight.
I could whinge about Tiger too (esp. the call centre).
However, our flights to Mackay (costing $82 return in TOTAL, not each, for a family of 4, including credit charge fee and luggage) during winter school holidays 2008 meant that our family of 4 from Melbourne could have a fantastic 10 days in the Whitsundays. Without this cheap (virtually free) fare, we would never have been able to have that holiday. We also had Sept school holidays in Perth ($402 in TOTAL for flights). Unbeatable!
I suggest people booked on Tiger check their booking online continually as flights do change.
Thanks for your comments. I was the person in the article above. I appreciate people can fly for cheap but it certainly wasn’t cheap for us as we had to pay top dollar for extra tickets at the airport as Tiger simply didn’t turn up. We checked Tiger’s website the day before to see if the flights were still scheduled to fly and they were. It even appeared you could still purchase tickets for the flight. Tiger has our email address, home and mobile telephone numbers and we heard nothing from them. Given the flight was cancelled at least a week before this is appalling service. It even took them 3 months to reply to our numerous letters and even then they addressed none of our issues instead stating in their letter “We appreciate your understanding that they have used our best efforts to minimise any inconvenience cause (sic) due to the schedule change”. As far as I can tell there was absolutely no effort on their behalf to inform us and 30 other passengers about the flight cancellation. Quite clearly I am still very angry about the complete lack of customer service we received from Tiger.