Promises mean nothing for furious airline passenger

Aug. 2, 2013 - PRLog -- One airline passenger, 20-year-old Adam Bradford, suffered a string of problems on a recent Etihad Airways flight to Doha.

Alongside delayed and damaged luggage, lengthy and expensive calls to log these complaints to track the baggage (at his own expense) a lack of on board catering, delays and seating described by him as 'not much fitter than a rabbit hutch,' you may think the party involved may go above and beyond the norm to put things right.

Etihad describes its customers as 'guests,' and prides itself on being self-named the 'world's leading airline.'

After this ordeal which cost Adam hundreds of pounds in replacing luggage whilst abroad, he complained to the airline after returning from this traumatic trip to Qatar. At first he was advised by agents on the ground to contact via e-mail, which proved fruitless – after being told by Etihad’s contact centre that it can take up to 8 weeks for a response to be formulated due to the high volume of queries.

After taking to Twitter this shell-shocked the company into ‘formulating’ a response and Adam was asked to re-forward correspondence to a manager who would deal with the matter and the refunds immediately. On e-mailing said manager, an auto reply saying they were on holiday and not due to return for a number of days was received.

Adam has since made over a dozen calls to the airline's Manchester contact centre, where managers are consistently 'in a meeting,' 'unavailable' or 'unfortunately unable to do anything.' There have been over a dozen promises of calls back from the airline's Guest Affairs department both in the UK and Abu Dhabi; five promises of refunds and reimbursements amounting to close to a thousand pounds and none of these promises have been kept to. The company's Twitter account claims the refund would have appeared in the customer's account by Wednesday, then Wednesday evening, then Thursday 1st August, then 2nd August, then 'soon.' The company have also refused to provide evidence of a refund being made.

This is truly a tale of customer service chaos and a disturbing reality of the schematic and misleading practices employed by a company which should by all respects be communicating properly and acting in a professional and honest manner. Adam's publicist commented: 'This is a serious issue now; we are not highlighting Adam's case here as such. This is more a tale of maltreatment and excuse-making from an organisation which thousands of people put their trust in daily. I can confirm that as of 2nd August no refund has been received and we have been told the issue now rests with our UK bank, of whom declare this is not their responsibility nor a delay in their processes. This is both upsetting and very disturbing and I hope this acts as a warning to future travellers.'