Saturday, September 25, 2010

What a Letdown AirasiaX....this is not how to launch a service in Japan....

Rastam, pakdokter's son, wanted to come home for the New Year, as he would have 4 days of company holidays and having got approval from his boss to take another 2 or 3 days of his own annual leave, he was hoping to be able to get about a week of holidays back at home.
And since Airasia had just launched their sale and promotion of their service to Haneda starting early December - Rastam went into their website to make his booking.
The booking was not a problem - well, at least not for Rastam. But Rastam pointed out that the Japanese customers would have some difficulty as some of the Japanese translation from the English version did not capture the Japanese ways of thinking accurately.
Anyway, Rastam got a seat for the dates of his travel and the airfare was attractive - about 50,000 yen ( RM 1800) compared to Malaysia Airlines ticket which cost almost RM5000!

But the problem was that the payment by credit card did not go through. It kept giving out an 'error' response - whatever that meant. And his attempts failed several times despite using several credit cards in his wallet - both Malaysian and Japanese ones.
The 'error' message advised him to contact the call centre - but there was no telephone number of that so-called 'call center'! There was a toll-free number listed but on calling up this number, the voice-message reply said they only operate between 9am to 5pm on working days!

Being an IT geek that he is - Rastam decided to scour the world-wide-web and see if other people in Japan were facing the same problem too.
Voila....what did he discover?
The chatter among the chat-groups;

all of them could not get their payment through -
all of them complained about absence of telephone number to call -
all of them complained about toll free message-reply that they operate 9 to 5 on work days only.
And what made us feel sad for AirAsiaX and for Malaysia -
some of these guys in these chat sites ( probably because of this poor internet experince) had asked the others whether they know anything about AirAsia's safety record!
And a few of them commented that they had no problems at all when the first Low Cost Airlines started its service in Japan - and that low cost airline is one from China!
Malu-lah AirAsiaX!......this should not have been the way to launch your service in Japan....

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