Enough about that twenty pounds already
On a Sunday, I read the Maltese newspapers not for information or entertainment, but for irritation. I believe a new word was coined for this phenomenon: irritainment. Today, in The Sunday Times, first there was the tedious Roamer, whose column should long ago have been subjected to merciful euthanasia or handed over to somebody younger and more in touch with contemporary life, who chose to join forces with yet another never-been-married childless septuagenarian, Fr Anton Gouder, to hector us about the untruth of what is claimed about teenage sex and drinking in Malta, and its relevance or otherwise to the evils of divorce.
Then there were the rigorously anti-divorce letters in the same newspaper, written by people who seem to see Malta as some kind of last bastion against the twin false idols of Promiscuity and Cohabitation. They present a skewed picture of public opinion: the internet version of the newspaper is thick with comments posted by people who think that Malta is the last bastion of ostriches with their heads in the sand. But that’s the thing with the technological divide: conservative people of a certain age are against divorce and write letters to the newspaper because they haven’t quite mastered the internet. Everyone else campaigns and protests electronically.
Then there was the usual deployment of malapropisms and poor syntax in Malta Today, including the use of the word ‘procurement’ to mean ‘power of attorney’ (because, I imagine, it’s prokura in Maltese), which was made more irritating by the fact that the person doing the writing holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Malta – a bit like Anglu Farrugia, whose English is from hell and whose coherence in Maltese is only slightly better, graduating magna cum laude in law from the same outfit.
Then I dozed off to the sound of cicadas and woke to some more irritainment, starting with this letter in The Sunday Times. You would think that a man whose wife has just undergone an emergency life-saving operation would have other things on his mind than how to secure the refund of STG170.20 for unused Air Malta tickets – or, once he had secured the return of taxes to which he was entitled, to pursue the matter of STG20 with time, long distance telephone calls, emails to customer care and, when all else failed, a letter to The Sunday Times in Malta. It really takes all sorts to make a world. I would need hospitalisation, too, were I to live with such an intolerable pedant. Hilariously, somebody posted a comment beneath the on-line version of the letter, suggesting that the mistake was his own, because the administration fee of STG20 is per ticket, not per complainant.
Sunday, 31st August 2008
Refund from Air Malta
John Grima, London, UK
My wife and I were booked to visit Malta from June 19 to August 4. Unfortunately, my wife was hospitalised and needed a life-saving operation and consequently we had to cancel our visit. On May 27, I contacted Air Malta in London and explained the situation and asked if I could cancel our tickets and get a refund. A member of staff explained that the airline could only refund the taxes and any surcharges, less a €25 administration fee. I agreed with all of this and the cancellation was done and I was told that I would receive a refund in due course. The total fare for each person was £85.10 of which £24 was the actual fare. Therefore I was expecting a refund of £122.20, less £20 administration fee leaving a balance of £102. On June 11, a credit of £82.20 from Air Malta appeared on my account, a shortfall of £20. I again contacted Air Malta in London and was informed that I had to contact customer care in Malta (thus having to make an overseas call). Twice I tried to contact Air Malta customer care offices in Malta but nobody bothered to pick up the phone after having waited for 25 minutes and 15 minutes respectively. On June 17, I decided to send Air Malta an e-mail. I promptly received an automated e-mail telling me that my letter had been forwarded to the relevant department. Almost nine weeks later I still have not received any communication from Air Malta.
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I love your remark that you read the Maltese newspapers for irritation rather than entertainment. I too share that feeling and I can tell you that it works wonders for nostalgia (I have lived abroad for the last ten years). Reading this letter, I almost feel like cheering Air Malta for keeping this guy waiting on the phone for 15-25 minutes! My top candidate for irritating letters however are those from Maltese-Australians bitching that the weekly news show from Malta arrived late or not at all.
My thoughts precisely
Did anyone notice that he actually replied online? wow he must have been checking it out online to see how many ‘agree with his suffering’!!
I think you are missing the point, John Grima is making a stand over poor customer service by AirMalta. He is not complaining about the £20 , he is complaining about AIRMALTA not answering their phones , emails or mail. If the £20 was explained to him he would have probably accepted it. I can talk from ten year’s experience flying almost weekly from the UK that Air Malta’s customer service is the worst customer service I have ever experienced by a commercial organisation. Airmalta’s customer service just take you for an endless ride, whether my complaint regarded £10 or £1000 I always ended up giving up in complete frustration and despair. Luckily RyanAir now operate to the UK and my life is so much better, I am still bitter at AirMalta though for having made my ten years of commuting absolute hell.
[Daphne – Something tells me it’s all about the twenty pounds, not the customer service. He wouldn’t have fared better with British Airways, Lufthansa or Alitalia. And the refund was explained to him; he just misinterpreted it. But that’s not the point. The point is that here’s a man who, with his wife in hospital having a life-saving operation, prioritises getting a tax refund on two cheap flights from Air Malta.]
Ah someone from ‘London’ to teach us. Ok Mr. London Area so are we supposed to just take your word for it that airmalta is the worst customer service? Just like we have to take his word that he wasn’t told it was per person rather than him hearing what he wanted.
I think we’re not missing the point. It’s the usual ex maltese living abroad who look down on anything with the word ‘malta’ in it.
You feel lucky about ryanair? Hope you didn’t book online!
yes i fly ryanair every time, rather than airmalta, even if the dates and locations are not ideal I would rather get two flights and a train than travel airmalta,
how airmalta are still in business I do not know, electronic tickets that are dishonoured, wrong details on tickets, delayed flights, rude air hostesses, lost baggage, change of flight details without informing me, and so on. That is not to mention the refunds that never materialised, their customer service that cannot speak english or maltese and their website that is more often offline than online. I canhonestly say that after 80 consecutive flights with RyanAir I havent had a single cause of complaint, and yes, I book online, I change flights online and I check-in online and it has always been flawless , with not a single flight delay. In fact most times the flight landed ahead of time. I can honestly say RyanAir has transformed my life since I commute every week from Malta, and by the way, I dont live in London I live in Msida.
My my such anger…calm down. Start a new religion since ryanair have transformed your life. geez
Electronic tickets that are dishonoured – when? (Ryanair wanted to do this lately and had problems with Berlusconi)
Delayed flights and lost baggages – of course. Ryanair never do this and only airmalta do this. (again geez)
Air hostesses – rude and customer care do not know english or maltese (what do they know then?)
Calm down london area and stop generalising. I won’t show off how many flights I’ve been on but I’ve always been ok on Airmalta. Won’t go so far as to say they are my new religion though.
I find it even more hilarious that the Times publishes these silly letters at all. so many letters are just moaners who have nothing better to do in life, like Emily Barbaro Sant (Malta’s Mrs Bucket) who once complained that her postman on average collects the mail from the postbox some 15 minutes early…can you imagine Emily Bucket Barbaro Sant standing by the postbox everyday with her stopwatch !
and another unforgettable one was from Economist Karm Farrugia (the same economist who had proposed that Malta should solve the budget deficit by imposing an additional tax on Gillette razor blades), complaining about maltapost charging him 5 cents (YES FIVE F@@KING CENTS) on a letter with insufficient postage stamps.
@Roma
Ah someone from ‘Rome’ to teach us,
if you’re so happy with AirMalta then you are welcome to keep using them, as far as I am concerned I am putting my money where my mouth is and will not not use Airmalta until they sort out their customer care. Maybe I was unlucky in the ten years of using them almost every week I had problems with almost every ticket and every fare, that is very bad luck indeed.
For example, listen to this example, I once booked five tickets online in one session, each having a different date and a some having a different location. Their onlne booking system assumed that each seperate booking was a mistake (since they all had my name) and so they cancelled each booking in turn . Not only did they not apolgise for the four flights I lost, but they had the audacity to charge me for all five flights, although they gave me only the one flight! Not only that, the only one single flight I was given did not have a date, just a destination and flight number, and Airmalta themselves were unable to tell me which flight of the five I was given !
LM1,000 down the drain and a week of hours on their customer service line and i still got no further!
They should refrain from using the word “Malta” in their company name though since this is giving a bad reputation to other maltese companies.
If Airmalta is partly privately owned it should stop using the word “Malta”.
London Area, your boring the hell out of me!
@London Area
reading your last complaint, it is indeed strange how you never wrote to the Times about this incident (Lm1000 down the drain, as you put it), but you felt you should write to complain about £20 AirMalta would not refund you !
I have to side with him on this one. Isn’t it a bit callous to say that because his wife is in need of medical care, he shouldn’t worry about mistreatment by a company?
The conclusion would be that it’s ok to rip off someone with a family member in need, as he should not take the time to complain. Perhaps it is, as it seems from the above, not the first time this upset the gentleman and having to deal with a hospitalised wife just pushed him over the edge.
Also, isn’t it remarkable that what they gave back to him was something that was not for them to give. They refunded the taxes, which will not be payable by Air Malta as he isn’t departing on the flight, so in reality Air Malta sold a seat, gained a further twenty Sterling and can still sell the seat.
[Daphne – The point is that claiming back STG175 from Air Malta doesn’t loom large on the priority list of the average person whose spouse needs a life-saving operation. In that situation, most of us (I would hope) would think in terms of ‘to hell with that’.]
I have no idea about the circumstances of this gentleman, but I still don’t see why anyone else should complain about him claiming money due to his wife’s illness. Maybe he needs something else to focus on, maybe it’s, as I mentioned, just what pushed him over the edge, maybe the operation is causing him financial grief and every penny counts.
My point is that whatever the reason is, he does have a valid claim and why should he not be elligible for this claim for the simple reason that his wife is sick. If anything I think we should all show him more sympathy.
Can’t we just for simplicity agree that I am right and you are wrong :)
[Daphne – Pat, do the national newspapers in Sweden publish letters like these, from Swedes living elsewhere complaining about a petty refund from an airline, in the correspondence pages of the main newspaper, rather than – at a stretch – in the travel supplement? Just wondering, given that I don’t read Swedish. But I know I’ve never seen anything similar in the national newspapers published in London, though complaints about airlines and similar might get a mention in the Sunday travel supplements.]
A smaller local newspaper would, but even the larger ones have supplements for consumer complaints, which would cover cases like these and in all honesty a feature like this might have even been featured by a journalist, rather than just a letter, in case of repeat offences by the airline. Journalists in Sweden, and I actually say this regretfully in many cases, are quite keen on jumping on these kind of cases and make a big fuss about them. Consumer rights is a word that gets sickening, even after a very brief visit to Sweden.
Also, looking at the “importance” of the majority of letters to the Times, I don’t see this one as standing out in its lack thereof. Just from today we have:
– Does the 435000 people projection of 2035 include immigrants (illegal/irregular)
– Someone who is bothered by always calling the Easyline helpdesk (cause she has to dial a *, but it’s not mentioned on the card – shouldn’t she have learned by now?)
– Two dogs barking on a roof
Funny enough, the letters section is my favourite section of the whole newspaper. Probably for the same reason I actually enjoyed Dan Browns books; Neither have much quality, but they do offer a pretty funny read.
@david s
I never wrote to the Times to complain, the letter to the Times was written by someone called John Grima, I do not know this man, but I am sure he is just one of many.
I am sure this letter is just the tip of an iceberg, the vast majority of cheated customers don’t bother to write to newspapers because we are too busy , or because writing to newspapers does not produce any tangible results.
Daphne is wrong to undestimate what damage an unpaid £20 can cause, a recent letter to a radio in the UK regarding an discrepancy of just £2 in a credit card charge by RyanAir caused major newsbreaks and almost brought RyanAir down financially, if AirMalta want to compete with such airlines they would have to bring their customer care up to scratch. However I wonder have they ulterior motives in providing poor customer care, after all they left me short of hundreds of pounds, I wonder if their poor customer service is a convenient way of making more money off customers rather than pure incompetence. The Times did well to publish this letter, the devil is in the detail and such ocmplaints are what make or break an airline.
[Daphne – I think you miss the point that Air Malta did not cheat the man out of anything. He misinterpreted their explanation. I’m not interested particularly in sticking up for Air Malta. I’ve had problems with them just as I have had with other airlines. To give one example, in June I arrived at the Glasgow Air Malta check-in desk 80 minutes ahead of the flight to be told by the Glaswegian blank-eyed dolly-bird at the counter: “Everyone has already checked in and there’s no seat left for you.” That (return) seat had cost me some EUR700, I was desperate to be back in time for an appointment, and there was no way I was going to accept the alternative of a connecting flight via Heathrow with so much photographic equipment that we couldn’t risk checking through. I had to stop myself from lunging across the counter-top and wrapping my photographer’s camera-lights around her scrawny neck. It was the air of sheer and utter indifference that did it, as though my problems were no concern of hers. I suddenly realised why British airports are decorated with massive signs warning you not to assault the staff or you will be immediately arrested. The only reason I made it onto the plane – 10 minutes before it took off – was because I made a lot of very angry telephone calls to home base, which in turn made Vodafone rather happy. I could practically hear the groans all the way from the Malta office: “Oh Christ, guess who we left stranded in Glasgow, of all people.” Only a few months before, my son and his girlfriend spent 10 hours in the departures lounge at Heathrow with no information from the Alitalia staff who were delegated to represent Air Malta, and then a night in an airport hotel, followed by more hours at the airport. The only reason they found out why they were waiting – a missed slot, apparently – was because I called the public relations department in Malta and let rip. But then I had to be the one to relay that information via mobile telephone to the waiting posse in the Heathrow departures lounge. I just shrug the whole thing off as part of the hassle of air travel – I’ve been overbooked by Lufthansa and sent to my destination on an alternative route involving two flights instead of one with a five-hour wait in some hangar of an airport, and given Lm30 compensation. I’ve had Alitalia repeat my arrival date as the departure date on the pre-electronic tickets, leading to chaos at the counter with 20 minutes to go before the flight. I’ve arrived at the check-in desk of some other airline with family in two only to be told that the name of one of my sons was not showing up on their confirmation list. I’ve had my suitcase arrive on a Greek island with no shops 24 hours after I did, with the result that I spent those 24 hours in the jeans I had flown in and couldn’t go to the beach. I’ve sat in a North African airport for five hours with three bored teenagers and around a thousand of what my schoolfriend used to call ‘shouting Johnny Hammills.’ I could go on, but I would never write about it for the newspaper. It’s too damn boring.]
@Daphne
no I still think you got it wrong, John Grima is complaining about the poor customer service and not the £20 discrepancy, he makes this quite clear in his response to the Times comment.
If a company likes Airmalta wants to bury its head into the sand, or make feeble and unconvincing excuses for the £20 discrepancy then fine, I will take my business elsewhere, there’s competition now and Airmalta cannot hold me to ransom as long as RyanAir keep their routes to Malta.
Oh God…is this still going on? yawn
[Daphne – Yes, unbelievable. We should pass the hat around and collect some change.]
@ London Area
Surely the point is that readers of The Times letter page
are not the slightest bit interested in other peoples’
complaints when they are so personal. Shouldn’t the
gentleman be writing to Adrian Muscat Inglott with this
sort of complaint?
There’s lots to gripe about but the gripers should try flying Alitalia, preferably on a long haul night flight held up by rainstorms AFTER they’ve boarded the plane.
On a positive note, I once had a problem on an Air Malta flight from Heathrow and the Air Malta staff there were very helpful.
Dear Mrs Caruana Galizia,
Being unwise in the ways of bloggers, but tempted to comment on your post, I shall write more formally than most.
I hope you’re not calling for Roamer’s column to be ‘euthanised’ simply because you disagree with him. I, for one, tend to agree with him and to disagree with you. It doesn’t stop me reading you both.
I also thought that people call for others to be ‘euthanised’ for the good of latter and not to prevent them from simply annoying the former. If Roamer is so irritating, simply turn the page. On the other hand, there is something to be said for the views of septuagenarians. It’s called experience and (at times) wisdom.
Yours sincerely
John Caruana
(aged below 40, just about)
(Daphne – It’s interesting that you should point out you are unused to the ways of internet-based communication and then go on to say that, despite being only in your late 30s, you enjoy Roamer and agree with him. A bit of a whiff of old fogeyism there, I would imagine. It’s not because I fail to agree with him that I think he should be dropped – of course not. I consider these matters from one angle only: readership appeal. I’m very ‘sales’ driven. He could be a Labour-supporter for all I care, if he is a good read. The thing is that Roamer is not a good read: the language is archaic and the views are out of touch with contemporary reality. Yes, he has a keen readership, but it is restricted to those in his age cohort (you are exceptional), and they are dropping like flies. Unless Roamer’s column – which can be written by anyone under the same by-line – is freshened up to attract new readers among younger people, its readership will become ever more severely reduced with the passing of the years, regardless of the newspaper’s strong circulation. Even my grandmother, who was 97 when she died five years ago, used to toss the column aside in irritation in the last few years of her life, and my parents, who are just a few years younger than the current Roamer is, remark about his oddly outdated use of 1950s idiom. To my sons, in their 20s, the column might as well be dispatches from another planet, and to me, in my early 40s, it is quite irrelevant, besides committing the greatest crime a columnist can possibly commit, that of failing to amuse, entertain or inform.)