We had a Wednesday night flight from Amsterdam to Malta airport. The first portend of bad luck was when we arrived at the airport; rather than receiving e-tickets (like the rest of the civilized world), we had to go to the airport to pick up our plane tickets along with our Book o’ Travel Vouchers. The nitwits had gone and issued us three sets of tickets: one set with our first initial and last name, one with all our initials and last name (Dutch people have lots of initials – three or four on average), and one spelled completely wrong. We chose the first set, and let them keep the rest. When we arrived at the gate, boarding took an eternity since every family brought far too much stuff to fit into the plane. When we finally boarded, there was no room any more in the hold for my back pack. Away it went “don’t worry, sir, it will be waiting for you in Malta.”Yeah, right.
We waited 20 minutes by the luggage belt. No backpack. We went to the service desk. Even worse. Like every other modern industry, airlines have broken down processes into distinct elements, and systematically outsourced them. The end result is that nobody has any accountability for anything. Typical responses at the service desk:
“Sorry, but we don’t do Transavia, you need to contact the other handling agent.”
“Sorry, but if the airline didn’t off-load the luggage, then your problem is with the airline, not [the handling agent].”
See how this works? It’s always someone elses fault. Fortunately, I deal with oxygen thieves like this at work often, so I have the perfect strategy to get what I want: understand the process; get the names of the points of contact along all segments of the process; call them every 90 minutes and ask/beg/bribe/threaten until they are the ones waking up at night in a cold sweat wondering where your luggage is. It took until our last day, but I got my bag back (some luggage ape had to drive it out to our hotel in BFE himself), and I had a whole bunch of new friends throughout Malta airport who knew my life story … and I knew theirs.
The Circuitous Path from Malta Airport to our Hotel in BFE
I don’t blame the good people at Malta airport. I blame the airline. It wasn’t even with a proper airline, actually. It was Transavia. For those of you that don’t know, Transavia is to airlines like the Chicago Cubs are to baseball – except Transavia has no fans whatsoever. As far as I can tell, they only do charter flights for package tour operators – poorly. No one ever conciously chooses Transavia themselves (no one in their right state of mind would), sothey rely on package tour operators buying blocks of seats. Tour operators love them because they sacrifice service and competency to slash costs to the bone. And if they suck and you complain to your travel agent, it’s “sorry, sir, it’s not our fault. Your problem is with the airline, not with us.”
(Outsourcing, remember?)
After getting the runaround from a variety of customer service / bagagge handlers, we finally went through customs to our transport. For those who haven’t done a Euro-style package tour, this is where the Book o’ Vouchers comes into play. The BoV is the only record you have of what you’ve specifically purchased. In our case, we purchased two return airline tickets, three overnights in hotel (with Breakfast, but not with the precious lunch/dinner wharf scrapings buffet special), and transport to-and-from the hotel.
Our “transport” was a huge “special bus”-style van with questionable suspension. Naturally, this independent operator had seats on his bus booked by loads of travel agents including our own, so the bus was full of cranky Dutchmen who’d been waiting in the bus a half-an-hour already for my sorry ass. I spoke with the driver and explained the situation. He rolled his eyes. It clearly wasn’t the first time bags had gone missing. “Go get as much as you can in writing. I’ll wait.”
I ran back in, ignoring the nasty stares from my fellow package tourists. Even my girlfriend was getting nervous, as the Dutchies were apparently getting increasingly crotchety. I looked back at them for a moment – these were the same jerks who pushed and shoved off the plane when we landed as if it was on fire so they could be first in the bus, first to customs, first to the front of the luggage belt, etc.
“F*ck ‘em, ” I said, and took my time strolling back in. If they were in such a rush, they could have skipped paying for a transport voucher in their Book o’ Vouchers, and taken a taxi.
By the time I got back to the bus, one of the women was complaining so voluminously (ostensibly about a window being open, and she was freezing), that even her own husband had to ignore her along with the the driver and I.
Our trip to BFE took almost an hour. It was dark, so I was never sure, but I swore we must have done eight laps around the island. We dropped people off at four different hotels before ours, and we were the last people in the special bus. It was almost midnight when we finally arrived – exhausted.
1 Comment
December 20, 2007 at 4:27 pm
very interesting. i’m adding in RSS Reader