To whom it may concern,
I’m writing to inform you of our recent experience travelling using your airline.
My partner and I decided to fly using Tiger because of your cheap fares, as we are students, and available flight times. Our flight from Melbourne to the Gold coast went without a hitch but our return flight was an absolute nightmare.
We were originally due to fly out on Wednesday July 8th, 2009 at 10:35am. At 9pm, the night before, we received an SMS saying that our flight would be cancelled and that we will be contacted shortly. No one contacted us, we had to call the Australian call centre to which I was on hold for an hour and a half before my call was picked up but I couldn’t hear anyone (which happened 3 times previously when I tried to change our luggage allowance). By the time I actually got through to a live person my phone ran out of credit and I had to use another phone to call back and be put on hold again.
I got through to a gentleman in the call centre and was given no reason to the cancellation. While on the phone, my partner was on your website and found there were flights available later that day (Wednesday the 8th) but by the time your staff member had got to the point of offering us new flights there was none until Thursday. We luckily were able to change our airport transfer time and the accommodation we were staying at was able to rearrange their schedule to accommodate us for another night.
On Thursday the 9th we arrived at the gold coast airport, finally, for our new flight home to Melbourne. We sat beside a woman who had missed the flight the day before as well (she had missed a funeral because of the cancellation) and she informed us that her travel agent had told her that Tiger constantly cancels the Wednesday flight. We confronted one of your employees about this and they agreed that it was “a common occurrence”. My question is, why would you offer a flight that you are constantly cancelling? My partner suggested that you cancel it to fill spaces on the later flights but that is a huge inconvenience for your passengers.
To add insult to injury, our new flight was delayed by an hour which again was a rather large inconvenience considering we had already had to reschedule with my mother who we had asked to pick us up from Melbourne airport. To then get on the plane and be told they were waiting for a new flight plan to be submitted because the previous one had been lost? Ridiculous.
When we finally land in Melbourne the captain spoke over the loud speaker and asked the passengers to rearrange the seats for the next flight. Now I understand that there were delays and a flight was due to leave shortly after we disembarked but really, to ask your customers to do part of your employee’s jobs because your company does not provide enough turnover time to allow for delays? Not our problem.
In normal circumstances, I would have not been this disappointed in your services. But according to your own staff and a travel agent you constantly cancel the flight we were originally meant to fly on. Surely you could have contacted us earlier to change our flight to suit your airline and we would not have had to stress and reorganise our plans. Your airlines failure to do this cost us an extra $95 for an extra night’s accommodation that really, we should have used to pay for more expensive flights from another airline and had a guaranteed flight. $95 may not seem much to some, but as students that is a week worth of wages.
This is a horrible memory to have of our first holiday together and I’m incredibly disappointed.
Sincerely,
gigglesqueak