20.5.08

Amazing Race Boracay Part IV:

"So this is how it feels like to be an irate customer..."[Mahaba ito pero pina-ikle ko na to. Mas mahaba pa dito yung actual na discussion namin.]

I asked him to show me how he came up with these figures, so he went back into the ticketing office. Fearing that it would take him another 45 minutes to get back to me, I followed him to see what the heck he was doing. I watched him try to re-compute the amount for one freaking ticket three times without being able to come up with same number twice.

Troll #1: "Ma'am kase hindi ho fixed yung prices ng ticket nagbabago po sila."

Me: "I know what "prices are not fixed" means. Thank you very much. But are you freaking kidding me? I saw you check the prices, they were the same every time."

So he tries to compute it again...

Me: "I'm just trying to understand how it's possible that I would be paying this much more when the base fare for the flight is lower than what I had before. Your math just doesn't make sense."

Troll #1: "Ma'am based po kase yun sa booking class niyo dati. Tingnan niyo po dito. Sabi pag nasa Y class..."

Me: "S class ang return ticket ko, hindi Y."

Troll #1: "Ay sorry po. Pag nasa S class... ganito po yung tax."

Me: "Okay. But I booked this ticket online myself. I saw the the amount that it charged for the taxes. It's almost the same as that. It's not two thousand pesos more, which is what it would need to be in order for you charge me this much to exchange my ticket."

then another idiot tries to help the poor guy out...

Troll #2: "ma'am hindi po kase kame nage-exchange ng ticket. Babayaran niyo po talaga lahat ulit."

Me: "What! Are you telling me that it's not possible for me to use the money that I've already spent on this ticket towards purchasing a new one?"

Troll #2: "Opo."

Me: "Eh bakit may rebooking penalty pa kayo kung ganun? Sinong pipili na magbabayad nung rebooking penalty kung babayaran din pala lahat anyway?"

Troll #2: "Kaya nga po mas maganda na gumawa nalang ng bagong booking para hindi na kayo magbabayad nung rebooking penalty. Yung no-show fee nalang. Tapos refund nalang po yung hindi nagamit."

Me: "Listen, I read your fare rules. And it says nothing about what you're telling me right now. It say's here that flight changes are allowed with the payment of applicable fees and any fare difference. Bakit kailangan pang i-state yung fare difference part kung hindi niyo rin isu-subtract yung dati ko ng binayaran?"

Troll #2: "Eh ganun po talaga kase."

After this I texted Melay saying "hindi marunong umintindi ng tagalog tong mga to."

Me: "Eh di lawyer na kailangan ko dito? Kase fare rules are there for a reason. Hindi ba para siyang terms ng contract. It's supposed to tell me what I can and cannot do with the ticket. I was actually pleasantly surprised that it said that you allow flight changes and that the tickets were refundable even though your fares are cheaper than PAL's. I was expecting your rules to be much more restrictive because your airline is trying to make flying cheaper. That made me quite happy that I was flying using your airline.

Now, based on what you're telling me, it seems that everything that's written here is nothing but a hoax or worse, that I misinterpreted them in some way. That's deeply disturbing for me because I used to explain these rules to other people for a living. I used to exchange tickets, for different airlines, based solely on how I understood their fare rules. Now you're telling me that if I had exchanged these tickets based on what I've read that I'd be getting a memo because I was an idiot who couldn't understand plain and simple English."

Troll #2: "ma'am kayo po bahala. choice niyo po yan."

At this point my Melay walks into the ticketing office. I was ecstatic. Finally, another human being, someone I can talk to. My head was about to explode trying to explain things to the trolls that I've been dealing with.

Me: "Melay... Do you know what they're telling me now? Wala daw kwenta tong mga tickets natin..." blah... blah... blah.

After I finished making 'sumbong' to Melay [Sorry. Saying "telling on them" just doesn't produce the same mental picture as saying "sinumbong ko sila kay Melay." :p], their supervisor finally approached us and asked "Ano po ba ang problema?"

Melay told her what was going on. The supervisor explained that it was the system itself that was going to compute how much we needed to pay. I told her that that wasn't what her agent was doing. He was getting prices for new tickets and then doing some sort of magical mathematical procedures on it to get what he was quoting us. She then tried to explain again that the system was new and it was responsible for computing charges. Instead of getting into a game of "how many ways can you say the exact same thing using different sentence constructions?" with this person, I just asked the agent to do the procedure that she was describing. And guess what? He didn't know how to do it. Hehehe. Another person, who seemed to be off-duty, had to step in and do it for him.

While working with the only competent Cebu Pacific employee in Caticlan [too bad I was too stressed to remember to get his name, we didn't forget to thank him though] we were able to finish getting accurate and mathematically verifiable price quotes for all 5 tickets in less than 10 minutes. Now the only problem was whether we had enough money.

posted by jeanne @ 05:26

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