Complaint Review: Malaysia Airlines

This is a copy of a letter I sent to the company:

Administration Manager
Malaysia Airlines, North American Office
100 N. Sepulveda Boulevard, Suite 400
El Segundo, CA 90245

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to voice my displeasure at your company, its responsibility to its customers, and your overall customer service. My friends and I (3 passengers) recently flew with your airlines, Malaysia Airlines, on a 4-city Asian itinerary covering 8 different flights that we bought on your Access Asia Pass promotion. We flew from December 25, 2002 to January 13, 2003. We did not run to any significant problems with your airlines until the last flight on our itinerary.

We were told that our flight reservations were cancelled because of some no shows in our itinerary. We showed your airlines personnel at Kuala Lumpur International Airport our complete set of boarding passes that we saved from all of our legs. We showed up at all of our flights, but we were nevertheless cancelled on our return trip to Los Angeles.

The airlines personnel and management at KLIA would not do anything and seemed to care less what would happen to us. We were forced to stay at an airport hotel overnight wherein it was a struggle just to reschedule our flight for the next day.

Getting back to the states, the customer service we received was nearly non-existent when your sales agents hear that we were placing a complaint and asking for a reimbursement. One agent in particular, Veronica To of the San Francisco office, was particularly frustrating, since she seemed to care more about proper procedure and busy paperwork than helping us out. She never once tried to extend herself in our predicament. On the phone and in person, she seemed to be indifferent and had the why are you bothering me look and tone. We were not sure if she actually followed up with any our requests. It got to a point where we were not sure if our messages to her managers were even forwarded, so it took more effort from us to try to get a hold of the a manager, any manager to look into our problem.

It takes a lot for me to get angry since I used to work in a client-contact position myself and I can understand the pressures of the position, but I can honestly say that this is the first complaint letter that I took the time to write, which shows the extent of my frustration with your company.

Anyway, after discussion and research by the SF office manager, Ruth Esparsa, it was determined that there had been duplicate reservations (two separate ones) and because one of the reservations had no shows (since we followed the other itinerary), they cancelled our last flight.

The travel agent that booked our itinerary was blamed for the error and the SF manager basically would not claim any responsibility. I was quite appalled that Malaysia Airlines would not even share any responsibility for this problem. It is true that the travel agent might have made an error, but I question why Malaysia Airlines is taking no responsibility at all.

I was quite puzzled why the only cancelled flight was the last one, when we supposedly no-showed since the third flight.

Apparently, nobody at Malaysia Airlines checked on any subsequent flights until the eighth and last one, which just tells me that you either do not apply your no-show policies evenly or you dont have computer systems sophisticated enough to catch duplications. Or worse yet, you have airlines personnel who are lazy and do not check passenger reservations and ticketing.

Anyway, we were and still are only asking for a reimbursement of $297.00 USD for the inconvenience of booking an airport hotel and changing our connecting flight on another airlines, which I would assume for Malaysia Airlines is a relatively small amount.

But your airlines, for all your supposed sophistication and customer service did not even want to partially reimburse us, just a sorry and goodbye letter from Ms. Ruth Esparsa. If you need to see our whole file to look into this complaint, you can probably find it in the San Francisco office, unless you run into Ms. Veronica To, which might delay everything for another month (if you are lucky).

Sincerely and regretfully,

John
San Leandro, California
U.S.A.