Overbooking - making their problems their clients' and no feedback!!

<p>We deliberately booked the 8h10 flight from OR Tambo to Cape Town on 2 Oct as we needed to get to Cape Town as early as possible that Sunday morning and arrived at the airport more than an hour before departure only to be informed that the flight was overbooked and that we have to go and wait by the standby counter in order to hear on which later flight they can accommodate us. The first thing that they then defensively make you aware of is that "every airline is allowed to overbook 10 seats per flight for in case some people don't show up. Honestly Kulula - do you realistically think/expect that on a flight where some seats on a "low budget" airline that ends up costing R2500+ one way during peak times, that 10 people aren't going to show up?! This greedy principle clearly counts against you due to all of the inconvenience that you're not only causing 10 of your clients per flight, but also the time and effort that you have to take in having to deal with their justifiable complaints - so no one wins!! In this case all of the 10 unlucky passengers who got overbooked along with us - and some being clearly even more frustrated than we were ourselves (and we obviously weren't very happy!) ended up at the standby counter and while we were still standing there more than 30mins later the next 10 frustrated people who were overbooked on the next flight queued up behind us!! I then went and deliberately walked passed the other airlines' standby counters and funnily enough didn't come across another one nearly as busy and overcrowded as Kulula's! Then they try and calm everyone down by handing out vouchers which can be used on (future) Kulula flights - as if anyone who gets put through that ordeal will ever fly with Kulula again! I explained to the manager on duty, Mr Lawrence Tlhako, that the only fair way of resolving the inconvenience would be to give the additional 10 people who can't go on the flight which they paid and showed up for full refunds (seeing as Kulula still pockets the money from the 10 overbooked seats on each and every flight!) and then put them on the next flight (although this will obviously still not be good enough for people who will end up missing important meetings and events like weddings etc!), after which he promised to personally make sure that someone from Kulula's customer service dept would get in touch with me the following week - which was last week and not to my surprise also didn't happen! So next time you consider booking a flight with Kulula, just take into account that there is a very realistic chance that you will end up being one of the overbooked seats - and besides that that their service in general is also rather unprofessional... </p>