Pathetic airline with no customer service

On the 31st of March 2019, my family and I had the misfortune of being booked to fly (or not fly as the case actually was) on MK843 back to Cape Town.

We arrived (my wife and I and our two children aged 7 and 9) after being transported from Club Med La Pointe Canonniers at the airport around 1pm on Sunday afternoon to be informed that the expected departure of 16:15 was delayed to 18:25. That time arrived but there was still no sight of the plane or any information being relayed by the departure gate staff in terms of what could be expected in terms of departure time. At that stage, there was no indication of when we would fly and very little information from the departure gate staff (in terms of what was causing it, bar from a vague excuse that the technical team are attending to it) only to be told that the next update will be provided at 19:30. Roll on 19:30 and yet so information.

In the interim, meal vouchers were provided for the Tropical Break takeaway kiosk for a choice of either cold fried rice or fried noodles as the only options which was completely cold and inedible with the takeaway kiosk being unable to cope with the mass of people with only one microwave on site to heat the food on offer.

Just after 8pm that evening, after spending seven hours at the airport we were told that flight MK843 was cancelled and that the flight would be rescheduled and that hotel accommodation would be provided to travellers. In the normal course of events, that would have been fine but the incompetence and complete lack of customer care that followed completely destroyed the relaxation that was achieved whilst holidaying in Mauritius for the past 11 days which will likely result in my family and I never ever flying Air Mauritius ever again or perhaps ever considering Mauritius as a holiday destination again.

After going through customs we were directed to a single kiosk where only two ground staff assisted to help 200 irate passengers find suitable accommodation for the evening. We were assigned to the Peninsula Hotel which we were happy about as it was only 16 mins away from the airport, but that joy shortly dissipated when we arrived at the hotel to be told by reception that we were in fact not assigned to that specific hotel as another airline’s cancelled flight was already booked in an hour prior to ours (this was apparently a mistake that was made by Air Mauritius ground staff). We continued to spend another 90 mins at that hotel waiting to hear from Air Mauritius in terms of what the next option was going to be. By this time, we were extremely tired (especially our seven and nine year old children) as we had been in transit for more than 12 hours now. Eventually, close to midnight, we were informed that Air Mauritius had found alternative accommodation but that it was close to 90 minutes away on the east coast. We had no option but to accept this and endured the long drive to Long Beach resort to arrive well after 1am in the morning, only to be woken at 4:30am to catch the same bus back to the airport to catch the replacement flight that would leave Mauritius 9:30am the next morning.

I find the lack of information, complete incompetence and lack of customer care unacceptable during this whole process. How does one book close to 50 passengers into a hotel that has already been booked by another airline?? And secondly, how do you make travellers wait for seven hours at an airport before making the call to actually cancel the flight??