please close down

The last time I tried using voyager miles - in conjunction with a free companion ticket- , I was told I could only use one or the other, not both. Now while I understand that, it defeats the point of the miles or the companion ticket, because surely if I am flying, I want to use the miles I have accumulated; similarly if I am flying with my wife, I want to give her the companion ticket. This happened - I can't remember now - maybe 3 years ago. I've not flown SAA for probably 10 years, unless I'm mistaken. There's reasons for that, which I will share with you.

1. You are bureaucratic. This is your biggest problem. Instead of agreeing with me and allowing me to have my free tickets, you passed me from pillar to post between SAA and SAA Voyager, which resulted in me giving up and giving the business to Kulula or Mango.

2. You are overpriced. Your tickets are usually double the price of the other airlines.

3. Booking online is a weird experience and there's no "claim my miles" button which just gives you your miles and deducts/reduces your ticket price accordingly. Please go look at e.g. how booking a flight on the other carriers works, and copy that user interface. Your user interface looks nice but it is completely unusable. I've often just given up because I can't claim my miles WHILE BOOKING. You know how when you go to an online store, like wish.com, and it asks you if you have a voucher, and you enter the voucher number while booking? It's really easy. You make it hard on your website. No, I must first phone - as in use one of those old voice things where you type the number in - and phone a call centre - where some inept person answers - and then you get a bunch of bureacracy about why you can't use your miles, so you give up.

4. Your booking system tells me that I only need, say, 19000 miles - to book a ticket to cape town. When I try to actually do the booking, it tells me, no, I need 34000 miles, one way. I never manage to accumulate enough miles to actually use them - I would have to basically buy a few brand new cars every month to do so. The result is that it is literally cheaper for me to buy two tickets on kulula or similar, plus a meal at a restaurant before flying, than it is to book myself a single ticket and use my miles, with you. It's just a waste of time.

Frankly I am not remotely surprised you are going out of business, and I think it is for the best. Please note that the two reasons I have given above are the reasons no-one wants to fly with you. Go on a Kulula or Mango or whatever flight. Note the difference.

In fact, my advice to you would be to sell yourselves to Virgin, Emirates or Kulula ASAP. it's the only way to save yourself from inevitable bankruptcy, and would you PLEASE stop asking trreasury for bailouts? That's MY tax money you're chowing there.