« travel report, a touch belated | Main | i have discovered my spirit animal »
June 28, 2005
seriously. fuck 'em.
if there's one industry that's even more systematically got a full-on fuck-you approach to customer service than banks do, it's airlines.
a couple of weeks ago it took me two hours to echeckin on SAS, the only like most used feature on their site i'm sure, and it but paraded a staggering array of incomprehensible behaviors such as changing languages at random, popping up windows that self-destruct before they're fully open, giving me mission-critical links that do literally fuck all when you click them and telling me every two minutes that "yo, that's twenty minutes of inactivity on your behalf right there, sir. i've timed myself out out of this session" what, is scandinavian.net on a different time velocity zone from the earth?
like fuckin 'ell. also, the below is what i just sent to KLM:
hi
this is seriously too stupid, i can't believe i'm even writing about this. see, i tried to join the flying blue programme.
first i tried it in firefox, page tried loading for forever so ok i switched to internet explorer. i'm not complaining yet, this is just exposition.
i filled in the first page of questions, i got the second page, filled it in, got a bunch of absolutely RETARDED error messages such as one, that my security question can't contain other characters than alphabets (like a question mark), and two, that my phone numbers must contain country code yet can't contain the standard plus sign; after gradually clearing these and other hurdles in several steps--which task took me way longer than it humanly should, and i'm a professional web designer for crying out loud--and so but the last thing i was stuck with was the--really, get this, this is SO good--"i agree with the conditions" type thing where i was instructed to check the box AND THERE WAS NO BOX TO CHECK. exactly how annoying that is after 10 minutes of absolute waste of time is hard to convey, so please just take my word for it: it was the rough equivalent of a real-life customer service person spitting in your face.
please contact me over this and help me get signed up in a humane manner or i will choose another airline for the flight i'm planning as well as all future flights, i will not subject myself to the web form again.
best regards
matti keltanen
also, i'm still waiting for my kuwait trip miles to appear on my lufthansa frequent flyer programme, and fuck if i know if they're there because for the last couple of days the "my mileage account" link has been leading to the following page (i am copy-pasting the entire source code of the page here for convenience):
Error 404: Error reported: 404
Posted by matti at June 28, 2005 02:31 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.mattikeltanen.com/movable/mt-tb.cgi/106
Comments
Ehh... Yeah.
I myself am still waiting for Flying Blue bonus miles to appear from my trip to Tanzania on January(!). I had to snail-mail(!!) copies of my flight tickets over to Netherlands because their retro claiming form didn't function (as doesn't pretty much anything on their site for that matter).
But maybe the most horrid experience was when trying to reserve 3 tickets to NY from Air France's site. After completing all the passenger information for the last seats on the plane, I get this database error. As I re-try, the seats are gone. Thank god this angel of a customer service lady was able to arrange the seats over the phone.
Posted by: Risto at June 28, 2005 03:16 PM
i had the exact same deal with SAS--what the shit is up with that! i had a choice of about five seats left on the plane, one of which was a frontish-row aisle one, so for a short flight that's the way to go, right? so i try to click on the seat on the diagram and NOTHING happens.
so i call customer service and there's a really friendly dude called andreas o-----, who--what a fucking job!!--calmly listens to my endless, good-luck-getting-a-word-in diatribe about the site and he goes "ok so you want seat three charlie?" "yes! precisely." "this is odd.. i can't seem to book that seat. any other seat, yes, but not that one."
boy do those fuckers innovate. that is some cutting-edge ennui.
Posted by: m at June 28, 2005 04:25 PM