Letters | Sunday, 15 February 2009

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Customer service, Air Malta style

As a frequent flyer with Air Malta, I wanted to change my pre-booked summer holiday into an earlier flight, so I took the long and arduous way of getting in touch with their office in Putney.
After many times trying to speak to someone, I was told that this office was no longer available in the UK, and was given an 0906 phone number for an Air Malta call centre.
When I finally got through, the first thing I was told that this call would cost 50p per minute. Fair enough, but after I had to listen to a lot of gibberish, asking me to press this button or that number on my phone, I finally got a female voice (not a very pleasant one, I must say) and after I explained to her that all I wanted is to change my flight date into an earlier one, I was asked for my flight number and booking code.
Amazingly, it took this girl eight whole minutes just to work out how much more it would cost. To change the date would cost the sum of €89... but plus the phonecall, it would have been at least over €100.
When I asked why it was going to cost so much, she bluntly told me that if I wanted this service I would expect to pay as I was the one who phoned them.
So I declined to pay that highly inflated sum, and thanked her for being rude to me. After that I got in touch with my family in Malta, and wonder of all wanders the sum went down to only €60 as it should have been the first time.
One thing that I would like to say to Air Malta that if they want to keep their frequent-flying customers they will have to give a better service and to educate their customer service employees, as nowadays there is more that one airline flying to Malta, and they are cheaper too.

Francis Grech
London

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