My girlfriend and I booked a flight the other day to go from Umeå to Stockholm. Usually we travel with Malmö Aviation since they land in Bromma, close to her family thus cutting the travel expenses a bit.
Since I have to go to Stockholm before I go to Oslo, and I have to bring a lot of luggage, we decided to fly with Norwegian, a low-cost company that allows their passengers to bring up to 40kg for the small price of 100SEK, add that we only pay 323SEK each for a ticket, we got away pretty cheap. Or so. We. Thought.
Turns out we did a minor error. Since we want to bring our cat, Noppe, with us, and we did not see that we could do that via Internet, I called them to add a cat-ticket to our original order. Problem was, that’s not possible! You have to book ALL your tickets via phone, thus paying an extra cost, plus the cost for the cat-ticket. I tried to sweet talk the girl I was talking to, who promised to try her best – which turned out to be squat-shit. Said and done, my girlfriend grabbed the wheel and called them up. This time, they meet stone with fire. Nothing could be done. We could choose to pay a re-booking fee of, here this 400SEK per ticket, plus some other “hoopla cost” reaching up to 1,500SEK total. Add the original price of 860SEK, thus turning our tickets to FAR LESS than cheap.
Now, I’m a reasonable guy, and my girlfriend knows A LOT about service mindedness after working as a store clerk for several years – in our world, we believe that the customer might not always be right, but as a company and especially as a representative for this company, you should make the customer feel as if they are so. Right, that is.
FAIL!
The girl we talked to said that we OBVIOUSLY should have known that this was the case, even though all of the other airlines we have flown with let’s you book your ordinary ticket via Internet, and after that you call them up and reserve a cat-ticket. The cat isn’t even that big.
We have meet this “problem” with Malmö Aviation, interesting enough is that it wasn’t a problem. They fixed it, and it did not cost a cent (öre) more. They fixed it. A ticket from Malmö Aviation cost approximately 499SEK, this includes a hot meal, 20kg of luggage, news papers, and this service.
So, what do I want to say with all this. Well, that Norwegian losses more in not being cooperative, than if they could have done their best to help us. Not to put this astronomical amounts to rebook if that would mean the fee is more than the ticket itself, and we are almost two weeks prior to the travel day.
I know that when you book a low price ticket, you might loose some of things, food, destinations, a pillow, news papers – but it is not until now that I have realized that service could be one of those things.
I will, however, let this one rest for a week or so, and come back to it. Who knows, I might see it from another angle then.