30.3.07

Budget airline, budget website?

After months of whinging about it, I have finally booked that damn vacation.

Of course, it's in August, but still.

On Adri's sound advice ("Terminal 1!", "assigned seating!", "20 kg baggage allowance!", "no aunties with plastic bags!"), I went with Jetstar instead of Tiger Airways --- also because a Jetstar ticket wound up being about $30 cheaper overall. Despite being a seasoned internet veteran, this also marks the first time I've ever booked an air ticket online. Which leads me to two interesting observations (read: gripes) about the Jetstar website.

When you make a ticket booking, you have to indicate a contact person and assorted details. Strangely, while there are no character limits on the fields where you key in the travellers' names, there is a 14-character limit on the last name of the contact person. I have a 15-character double-barrelled last name, which I whittled down to 14 characters by dropping the hyphen in the middle. But what about all the lovely people who have less truncatable last names (particularly Asian ones)?

So I thought I would do what everyone does in the internet age: click on the link for "contact us", which would no doubt lead me to some kind of online form that I could fill up with the above observation and click on its merry way to the Jetstar feedback department.

Jetstar's "Contact Us" page states:
If you have any feedback relating to our customer services or web site please forward them in writing to the applicable address. [emphasis mine]
Snailmail? They want feedback on their website to be conveyed through snailmail? My mind, it's still boggling.

Jetstar gets an A for having cheap tickets and all the other perks that Adri mentioned. But I'm not sure how many points I'll dock for the level of customer-unfriendliness at the end of the day.

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2 Comments:

At 3/31/2007 5:25 am , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Never seen that -- but can imagine that must be quite frustrating. Anyway they have these call centres you can call for any purpose -- make use of that! :)

Happy tripping!

 
At 4/15/2007 12:34 am , Blogger yikuno said...

i'm not sure i should say this now you've already bought the ticket but i hate jetstar. if nothing goes wrong it's a great deal. but i was delayed for more than 24 hours on the way back from siem reap and when i called jetstar in singapore (when i was still in siem reap the next day) the jetstar rep had the temerity to say the flight did take off the day more. just make sure you get some travel insurance.

 

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