CUSTOMER LEFT SORELY DISAPPOINTED WITH SIA’S BOOKING SERVICE

A reader sent us his review of his recent experience while trying to book SIA airplane tickets to Perth.

Read his account here.

Since whoever that responded (see attached) to my facebook post thinks that integrity within SIA is not important and still requested me to write in instead of taking the initiative to contact me without further delays, I am writing in with the exact same message that I have posted on your facebook page.

My wife and me planned for a holiday with our baby boy this Oct to Perth. Logged in to your website but was later confirmed by your agent that your website has some technical issues late last night. We were advised to change date or time of travel to secure the bassinet seat for my baby boy. We did that and was on the phone again with another agent around midnight. The agent was not helpful and simply tell us that he cannot help us to secure any bassinet seat unless we make a booking/payment. Upon his confirmation on the availability of the bassinet seats on both out bound and in bound flights, we made the online payment while holding on to the phone with this agent.

To our horror, this agent then told us within 10 mins of our payment that there is only 1 seat available next to the bassinet seat on the out bound flight and all 5 bassinet seats* (still available just about 10 mins ago) had been taken up! This has been a disgusting experience!

I requested to speak to his supervisor and was made to hold the line for 20 minutes. I tried to keep it simple believing that he has been briefed by his agent and put forth my requests (1) Find a solution to our problem (2) If no solution can be made, refund my payment so that I can go to another airline without any delay. I insisted that a return call be made to me by the next morning 10am on my 2 requests but the supervisor negotiated to return call by noon instead.

Guess what? I received 2 separate calls 10 and 5 minutes before noon today and both callers offered me the refund (request #2) straight away without even convincing me that they have tried their best to find a solution in the first place! What is happening to SQ? To me, they were trying to find an easy way out by telling me to take back my money and get lost! So that they can conveniently close my case?!

I pushed for more details during these 2 calls and discovered that the 5 bassinet seats in the in bound flight were actually fully booked by 6th Aug 2016*; meaning? The agent lied to us the night before and made us pay for something that does not exist at all! Is business that bad that SIA needs to resort to such tactics???

I am a Singaporean and have always been proud of SIA. How has SIA evolved to this??? Should someone propose an alternative to me instead of jumping to the conclusion of take back your money and go to other airlines for all we care!!!

My multiple requests to talk to someone from Singapore office was turned down claiming that there is no such channel. All I wanted to do was to give my free feedback on my bad experience and hope that SIA can learn from this and improve thereafter. I believe this is the spirit of our fore fathers during the initial nation building years which has lead us to where we are today in the world stage.

Extremely disappointed with this experience!

Mr. Ng
A.S.S. Contributor