Claim against airline - who to complain to and is it worth persuing?

balich

Hi, I have recently had a very frustrating experience with uk budget airline. Wont mention which in case it comes back to bite me. Could you please read through below correspondence and please advise if i should pursue my claim and perhaps take them to small claims court? The money is small but i feel it is disgraceful for a company to treat customers that way. So far i have stopped at threatening them to take it to CAA.

I would appreciate your honest opinion and advise. My emails are in double comments and in blue text:

"I am very frustrated with your new web service. I have just spent 20 minutes typing complaint which i will describe below.The webpage then came up with a message forcing me to Restart booking because my session has timed out. As a result i have lost 20 min of typing having only slept for 5 hrs in the last 3 days which have been very stressfull. Why would you want to have a session timeout on Claims page? I presume only to frustrate you customers and force them to provide less information perhaps? or is this another bug in your web interface? I am sure regulatory bodies will not approve this. Just consider a person with learning difficulties trying to fill Claims form online...

Here is my original problem:

I was not able to print my boarding pass on return flight from [UK] to [EUROPE]. Every time i tried to enter my passport details it threw up an error, mentioning that change is not allowed. I was forced to call your support centre from my mobile phone and spoke to a representative who first told me it is a problem with my browser. I had to stop him there as i have IT background, only then to be told that the problem is now solved. Before I could even try it, the person then dropped the phone on me after 5 min of conversation. I have tried to enter detail again on the website and the problem is still there.

I have no option but to re-dial your premium service number and this time i have spoken to a lovely lady by the name of MS Blogs (Ref:YYYY). After consulting with someone MS Blogs ahs told me that i was the first to identify this problem on your system (a bug). She managed to manually enter my passport details into the system which then allowed me to print my boarding pass. It took another 22 min to resolve the problem.

I was expecting to be compensated at this point for having found a bug in your software and spent a lot of money on the phone only to print boarding pass. Your web page timing out is also a very frustrating experience for customers who fill in complaint online. Perhaps it is another rather obvious bug that i found?

It would have been nice to be offered some sort of compensation from your representative, but unfortunately MS Blogs said that she is not able to provide any compensation. As i am flying out today it would have been nice to have priority boarding and extra leg seats (as i am 1.92m tall).

Please!!! I will put it at your discretion to offer me some sort of compensation (monetary preferable) for what i had to experienced today. Having spent 27 minute on my mobile phone i would be expecting a hefty bill at the end of the month, not to mention almost an hour writing and rewriting this complaint.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Regards

Balich"

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Dear Mr. Balich

Thank you for your letter to our Customer Relations Department. Please accept our apologies for the inconveniences encountered.

As a young but continuously developing airline we are trying all the best and most to improve our technical, human and service background. Our crew is one of our most important leg, and before them the most important on which a successful company can ever stand are the customers who give their trust we appreciate the most. So that our crew has been training regularly and high level education is required to handle their duty followed by the satisfactory of our clients.

Once again, we truly apologise for your inconveniences and would like to ease your dissatisfaction a bit with €10 in credits, which you could use while making later reservations.

It would make us more than happy if you would accept these credits, so we could transfer this amount to your personal airline Account (XXXXXXXX) by a goodwill gesture.

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

Yours sincerely,

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"As I have mentioned in my email I have spent 27 minutes calling your premium number (Xp per minute + network charges) from my mobile phone. A £10 credit is nothing compared to the bill I am going to receive for the phone calls I made. I am very, very disappointed with this offer and find this insulting as a customer.

I am afraid will not accept this amount as it will not even cover my phone bill caused by fault with airline system. Please be reasonable with your offers. I would have expected at least £50 in credit to cover the bill and for inconvenience caused, in the short time that I had in UK. You will notice that my flights were within same day and I had enough problems to deal with at the time. Having spent over an hour trying to print my tickets and then another hour trying to write below complaint email with your page timing out was very stressful and frustrating. So please reconsider your offer by looking at the circumstances closely.

Regards

Balich"
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"Hi.

I haven’t heard any reply to this complaint so I see no option but to escalate this to Civil Aviation Authority. You are terrible in handling complaints, but I am giving you until end of this week to reply to this email. If you were in my shoes, ask yourself a simple question. Is this fair?

Printscreen of the online bill is shown below if you want proof

PIC

My phone bill came up to £23.26. I don’t want any credit towards my next flights as I don’t intent to fly [your airline] again and I am expecting some compensation for the time lost dealing with logging a complaint caused by inadequate timeout of your webpage, and loss of written text as a result. £40 I think this is reasonable.

Regards"
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Dear Mr. Balich

Thank you for your response. Please note that the goodwill gesture is not related to your expenses. We would like to inform you that our phone number is a premium number which is reserved for special occasions as an extra service. Should you whish to use our services, they need to be paid for, therefore we are unable to refund the costs of you phone calls.

Moreover, I can guarantee you that our intentions did not include frustrating the Customers or providing them less information. The session timeout is needed only because of a matter of safety. There are also ways to avoid the timeout problem (e.g. copying from a text file).

We are extremely sorry for your inconviniences, and hope you will eventually accept this gesture.

Thank you for the understanding.

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"Hi,

I will not accept your gesture. This can be interpreted as you laughing in my face, and you are calling it a good will? For what exactly is this good will then?

This is ridiculous. I can understand the reason for premium number for special occasion, but in this case you have made me pay for your fault with your system. If this was due to me making a mistake then I would agree that I should pay for it by calling you premium number.

I have no option but to take the case to CAA.

Regards

Balich"
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"P.S. do you really think that people will consider using a text editor to write complaint before pasting it on your website? There should at least be a warning to the user to say that it will timeout within 20 min, and give them a chance to save what they written.

Yours sincerely
Balich"

budgetflyer

are you for real? the airline should send you a bill for wasting their time having to answer such drivel

111KAB

Good job it wasn't Ryanair - you would still be waiting (rightfully so) for a reply.

Pollycat

Mr Balich
I really do think you are wasting your time (and money if you do pursue this through the small claims court).



Your complaint fails on many levels.

• It is not concise.
• It includes sarcasm:

balich wrote: »

Why would you want to have a session timeout on Claims page? I presume only to frustrate you customers and force them to provide less information perhaps?

• You waffle - it's not necessary to say you've only slept for 5 hours in the past 3 days or to speculate how a person with learning difficulties would manage the claims process.

Your demands for 'compensation' increased from priority boarding and ELR seats to £50 in credit - you then say that you don't want credit anyway as you have no intention of flying with this airline again. Shot yourself in the foot a bit there as they don't have a lot of incentive to address your complaint. Then you want £40.

What airline is this anyway?

This sentence from them doesn't even make sense:

balich wrote: »

As a young but continuously developing airline we are trying all the best and most to improve our technical, human and service background. Our crew is one of our most important leg, and before them the most important on which a successful company can ever stand are the customers who give their trust we appreciate the most. So that our crew has been training regularly and high level education is required to handle their duty followed by the satisfactory of our clients.

Bob_the_Saver

Sh*t happens, get over it.

jpsartre

I've seen some rather pathetic attemps at using airlines as cash cows before and this one is right up there. I can see asking for expenses to cover your phone bill but your attitude and sense of entitlement makes me hope you don't see a dime.

_Andy_

Gave me a good laugh this morning.

Love "Please be reasonable with your offers. I would have expected at least £50 in credit to cover the bill and for inconvenience caused". Pure genius.

Incapuppy

Speechless!

(Does that still hold as I have actually written 'speechless?')

:rotfl:

Bogof_Babe

balich wrote: »

You will notice that my flights were within same day and I had enough problems to deal with at the time.

Why didn't you print both boarding passes at the same time, i.e. if you could print your outbound one wouldn't it have made sense to do the return one too?

_Andy_

"As i am flying out today it would have been nice to have priority boarding and extra leg seats " - pay for an upgrade then you tight git

balich

Thanks for the feedback all, and especially to Pollycat. I guess i have been a little inconsistent with my demands. But it was purely due to my frustration with the airline after my holiday were ruined and i had to leave my family abroad to sort out some problems.

The reason why i merely mentioned an upgrade for return flight was to say that it would have been nice if they could offer that after what i have experienced. I also, didn’t know what my bill would be until my last statement. Was expecting more as i was on mobile phone, so asked for £50. Asked for £40 after i have seen the bill. Still nothing for the stress I suffered.

Andy, before you call someone tight Git consider that they could have spent a fortune on these tickets already, having bought them less than 12hrs before flying.

And finally the reason why i couldn't print the tickets on my first leg was because i was purchasing the tickets in a small motel at night with no printer available.

I am over it anyways , not worth stressing over by persuing.

Thanks Again!