WeÂ’d like to inform our friends or other people who may want to choose budget airline for travel about the unhappy event as we will describe below. Please be noted that we mainly talk about the Tiger Airways (Tiger for short) company here.
On the late December, we eight people planned to travel to Phuket on the late January and booked one way air tickets from Tiger (Phuket - Singapore), and the price that time was s$42 each (the departure ticket from Singapore to Phuket is bought from another budget airline A). Unfortunately, the tsunami happened during Christmas and Phuket was severely impacted. Due to the safety concern, we decided to cancel the trip to Phuket. When we requested such change to both airlines, A agreed us to change destination, time and name without any penalty. But Tiger originally said we need pay for penalty for any change. After we negotiated with them for several times, they accepted our requirement which was quite reasonable at the first place, because it was not because of our fault to change the trip.
Then we decided to travel to Bangkok instead and the return date was fixed on Feb, 27. From Jan 24, we started to request such change. After four days on Jan 28, Tiger requested us to offer passengersÂ’ name details. But that time three of us quitted and another three people joined. So we sent out change request again with new passengersÂ’ information and the date was still the same. After that, we kept sending emails to enquire and waited for
18 days before Tiger replied (Feb 15) and this reply came after we sent fax to them. We presented our information again as required. Then, while we kept sending emails and fax to enquire the progress, Tiger made us wait for another
9 days to Feb 24, which was the time for us to depart. On Feb 24, we called, emailed, and faxed a lot of times to Tiger to request their confirmation of return tickets. At the last minute, they confirmed it but said that the original flight we booked was not available at that time and we had to pay top up for the current flight, which means each of us should pay
s$80 plus 8 more to make the trip. We were very angry but had no choice because time was so limited that we could not book another flight to be back, but just had to pay for it.
We strongly doubt that Tiger intentionally deferred our ticket change processing to get more payment from us. Actually the flight we took (TR109) was filled less than
1/3 of all the seats. If this is because of the low efficiency of Tiger officers, they should still follow the original flight information for reference. But their efficiency was so ridiculously low! If we didnÂ’t push them to confirm quickly on the last day, we may not be able to get the return tickets and may probably abandon the trip! We have complaint to the Tiger officers, but they said they had no way to resolve it. Since the customer service people said they had to refer this change to their management before confirmation, we doubt that management people of Tiger intentionally instruct their officers to deal with our change in this way to charge higher price from us. Although this amount of top up may not be a big deal for a lot of people, we strongly feel that our rights have been badly violated. And it is very irresponsible for Tiger to treat their customers in this way. Compared with airline A, who agreed us to change without penalty at the first time after tsunami and processed the changes for us just within half an hour through call, Tiger neither provides a direct phone call no to customer service department nor proceeds the request rapidly. More intolerable, they even showed much reluctance to reply by email! Tiger really places itself as a very untrustworthy airline company.
We want to inform all of our friends and people we may not know about this issue. Please be noted that no matter due to low work efficiency or intentional abuse, Tiger has left a bad image with us and we wonÂ’t choose it for future travel any more. Hope all of you will not encounter such problem.
