Juices Should Not Fly!!!

Eighth Entry:

Stick to your Zest-o juices, the airline industry is so not for you!!! It may only be one incident, but it is more than enough to make me swear off ZEST AIR. This is a true story, and it just happened a few hours ago.

My friend purchased a roundtrip ticket from Singapore to Manila online. He received his e-ticket confirming his booking for the Jan.29 flight to Manila and the Jan.31 flight back to Singapore. Then, at 8pm of Jan.28 (8pm!!!) he received a phone call from the Zest Air office telling him that the flight has been cancelled due to some “operations” issue which she did not identify and that he has been booked for a Jan.29 1030am flight of Cebu Pacific. When he asked her about his return flight, the girl casually replied “Di ko pa po alam, Sir.” And to complete the fabulous experience, she did not even ensure that the e-ticket for the Cebu Pacific flight had been forwarded to my friend. I had to call Cebu Pacific to send the e-ticket. They did, but yahoo mail wanted to add more fabulosity to the story. The e-mails from the airline were not getting through! I had to use another person’s gmail account to get the e-ticket. Oh, and when I called Cebu Pacific, I found out that the girl from Zest Air booked it personally because the email address she gave was something like “crazyme”. I thought they at least made formal arrangements with other airlines to accommodate “their” passengers. But no, they let some crazyme handle the situation. My friend has a serious matter to attend to here, and what they did was seriously morally damaging.

The flight form Singapore would have been the first for Zest Air. Maybe they did encounter “operations” problems (which according to CAB Economic Regulation No.7 exempts the airline from compensating a passenger who cannot be accommodated). So what??? There was nothing right with the way the situation was handled. No, they did not handle the situation at all. I’m sure Zest Air has its extraordinary diligence all figured out.

I don’t know how this story would have turned out if we still had the old school ticketing system. Can I blame this on online booking and purchasing? On the complacency it has created in the minds of people that it is so easy to book and rebook such that Zest Air, through crazyme, thought it could just do what it did?

I just hope this entry would save a soul from the wrath of a juice trying to fly.