Fly the friendly skies with anybody BUT Flysafair

So FlySafair after flight service has to be one of the worst I have ever had to deal with! Compared to every other airline I have ever flown with, they are hands down the most ***********, not to mention inept, team ever. Had a simple complaint which could have been dealt with immediately had they any interest in their passengers. Instead got the run around for over a week, with constant promises of updates, but zero delivery on those promises. Instead I had to call THEM to get my updates and was constantly told it was being investigated. I suspect the hope was their prevarication (as I am certain there was NO investigation) was simply a procrastination to get me to go away. Long story short, HORRIBLE airline. Also, cant help but notice that when I mentioned this to them on twitter and offered my dissatisfactions via email there was no assistance or reply forthcoming. However, a quick review of their facebook page shows they tend to only reply to the positive reviews, with the negative reviews getting nothing but a quick and deft sweep under the rug. If you are wanting to fly within South Africa, choose any of the other budget airlines if you want to be assured of proper customer service. As to you FlySafair, I suggest you look into better training for your staff and a good long look at your "Policies", if in fact they even exist. I will be writing more about this soon on my blog just to ensure the public, as well as my friends, know what to expect should they wish to do business with this airline. Sidebar: I have actually had two highly negative experiences with this airline. The first I put down to Murphys Law, but now I know its more a business shortfall in general. Disgusting service. Atrocious customer care.

I posted the above to Facebook, which had them hide the post from the public on their home page, but I have copied and pasted everything to my status updates on my home page. Their rather lacklustre response asking precisely what had gone awry garnered an eyebrow raise from me.

This was my reply: I suggest you ask Rushen, a manager at your call centre, about this. I assume your calls are recorded for "quality" purposes.

In essence, due to your Self Service Check In terminals, we missed our flight as no notice was posted to say that self-service was closed and to head to the check-in counter instead. Your customer service, after NUMEROUS calls from my side, decided to blame the Airport Authority as it is their physical system not yours.

I don't know how FlySafair does things, but in every company I have ever worked in we check the systems and tools we use, as we in no way can blame the tool should a client have a gripe. This is standard practice across the board.

Upon proceeding to the Check In counter, we were informed that the doors had closed of the aircraft as they were departing early. Never have I ever heard such a blatant lie. Aircraft do not leave early. Ever. Upon calling in to your call centre in the following week, I was told that in fact the aircraft had just started boarding.

Granted you are within your rights then to say so and not allow a passenger onto the flight. To lie and say the aircraft had closed its doors goes beyond the pale.

As an aside, I have been late before for a flight and the airline has made EVERY effort to accommodate me. Clearly this sense of customer care does not extend within FlySafair ranks. But, to each their own.

Nevertheless, we then proceeded to the ticket counter as we were instructed to please request our flight be moved. Upon reaching the counter, we were told we had no more than 1 option. Rescheduling our flight and paying a rescheduling fee was NOT an option we were told as the flight was full. Our only recourse would be to go on standby and hope and pray that the flight would have a cancellation or a no-show.

This, as it turns out, was yet ANOTHER lie by your staff as the flight was NOT full and one of our friends was able to purchase a ticket online. When we brought this up with your customer care department, we were informed that the ticket counter closes sales before the online sales closes. Yet again, this had to be investigated and I had to be the one to chase your staff repeatedly in order to get an answer. How this could be considered a valid answer is beyond me as I cannot help but wonder how your systems could possibly be this inept.

My theory is that your system is not in fact this badly run, but rather that your staff are either too lazy to do their jobs or not trained sufficiently in how to treat and handle their clients.

Thus, we are now out of pocket by a substantial amount of money, all because FlySafair does not or can not run what should be simplistic systems.