Cathay Pacific Rip-Off

On 14th August my son flew from Durban to Hang Zhou in China to start a 1 year teaching contract. Because he was going for a minimum of 1 year, he took 3 bags with a total of 67Kg. I tried to find out what this would cost by going on their website - but it was impossible to work out, or find any way to pay for this, despite their website promising it was 25% cheaper to pay ahead of time. Imagine my shock when my son was actually checking in at 5:00 a.m. in Durban that Cathay Pacific wanted R31,450 (that's almost $2,500USD) for 37Kg of extra baggage. I could not believe that they could possibly charge that much - and I argued with them to the point that my son almost missed the flight. Eventually I paid, in order for my son to make the flight - believing that it was an obvious miscalculation and that eventually some intelligent person would check and discover that there was an error, and that they would eventually refund the bulk of that figure. Nope - today I finally received an email from Cathay Pacific confirming that this is the correct amount. R31,450 for 37Kg of excess baggage. They have claimed in their email that R9990 was for the excess baggage between Durban and Johannesburg, on a flight that was actually flown by BA - when the BA check-in clerk informed me that the BA rate for 37 Kg of excess baggage between Durban and Johannesburg would have been R450. I have subsequently discovered that most airlines flying that same route offer 45Kg of free baggage.

Cathay Pacific - you suck! I thought that you were an honorable airline - clearly I was mistaken.