Last Minute Flight Changes !!!!
Friday, November 20, 2009
I don't know about you but I find myself continually frustrated by airlines and the way in which they change the price and time of flights at a whim to maximise their profits.
You would think that they would have some care for building long term relationships with their customers but it doesn't seem that way to me. In fact, my experience is that they seem to go out of their way to make sure you never book with them again.
One airline I use must change over half of its flights. Why do I continue to use them, good question, let me think about that for a while !!!!!
I must book at least five flights a year for myself and the family and no matter when you book you always find that you could have got a better deal and saved as much as 75% on the price of the flights if only you had a magic ball and knew exactly when they would be cheapest. Prices often change on a daily basis and also it can also make a difference depending on what time of day you book.
The other aspect of this that I find it even more frustrating is that having booked a flight, sometimes many months in advance, the airline wait until about two weeks before the flight and then tell you there has been a change to the date and/or time of your flight. Mostly, it is a change of a few minutes or an hour or two but it has happened to me where it has been moved by a couple of days or cancelled completely. Even small changes to the time can make a massive difference and impact on car hire and accommodation arrangements which may all need to be rearranged and can leave you out of pocket.
One flight recently was changed by a few hours which caused us lots of problems. When you call the airline’s “customer services” helpline on what seems like £’s per minute they make you listen for ages while they refer you to the website which you have already tried but doesn’t deal with your enquiry. When you finally get through the member of staff on the other end of the phone kindly refers you to the small print on the contract which says that they can change the flight time by up to 12 hours without the customer being able to cancel and claim a refund. You can however pay well over the top to rearrange your flight, pay their excessive administration fees and pay top whack for a new flight.
The same airline that has changed over 50% of the flights I have booked over the last few years took gold medal recently in the “how to patronise and loose your long standing customers in one easy go” award.
Having booked a flight many months ago the airline wrote to me to say that, because they are a quality airline who takes customer satisfaction very seriously, they continually review their schedules and as a consequence my flight was cancelled but they were delighted to offer me a flight a few days later. This new flight was no good to us whatsoever so we had to cancel and book with another airline. And yes, you guessed it, the other airlines had cottoned on to the fact that a number of flights had been cancelled to our particular destination and had upped their prices accordingly so the flight now cost me three times as much as it would had I booked it with them at the time I made the original booking.
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Published at 12:16 PM Comments (7)