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My letter....their response

To Whom It May Concern:

I wish to advise you of the inconvenience and distress experienced due to incompetence on the part of your employees or contractees in Virgin, Delhi, India. It unfortunately is a long and drawn out saga that I am loathe to re-live but will outline our experience in detail in order (hopefully) for you to take some action and attempt to arrange some level of customer service for your customers flying to and from India.

We purchased our tickets last November from a travel agent in Cork City, Ireland. We were advised at the time of purchase that our ticket was valid for a year and that we would incur a charge of 100 euro per ticket for any change in our return date. He also advised us that we would have to contact Virgin in India to make any changes once we had commenced our journey.

Thus, when on the 14th February 2008 we became aware that we would have to return to Ireland earlier than expected due to work commitments, we contacted Virgin in Delhi. Our initial contact with Virgin was tedious to say the least. I can say without exaggeration that I have heard every song on your hold tape, the representatives in India seem to have a penchant for pressing "hold" for no apparent reason. I came to the conclusion that perhaps you have outsourced your reservations office to a call centre as not one person was able to answer even the most simple enquiry without pressing the dreaded "hold" button and leaving me literally hanging. I realise that this is extraneous to the complaint but the phone system in India is far from reliable and it is incredibly frustrating to be placed on hold indefinitely when you are uncertain as to whether the line will be cut off for any number of reasons outside of your control.
Once I had established that we (party of 2) wished to change our flight date the struggle began in earnest. I realise that initiative is not a learned characteristic but it is definitely a necessary one in your line of work. There was absolutely no initiative or helpfulness shown on the part of any of those I spoke with. I had to quite literally spell out my request every time I called (which was increasingly frequently). At the outset we were informed that in order to check the availability on the Aer Lingus flight a request would be sent and we would have to await confirmation of availability. They could give us no information on how long this would take and were told to keep calling every day. This was inconvenient but not a major problem, as we understood that there was another airline involved.

We continued to call and became increasingly frustrated as we were constantly told that they were still awaiting information from Aer Lingus. Cabri, one of your employees in Delhi quite rudely told us that we could contact Aer Lingus ourselves to check availability but that we would be unable to reserve our places. I had been monitoring Aer Lingus flights online myself and was aware that there were still a lot of seats available for early March. Our initial request was to change our flights to the 1st week of March, we were open to flying whenever seats were available on both flights, so that we could travel home to Ireland in one day. I contacted Aer Lingus in London, only to be told that no requests had been received from Virgin, despite constant assurances on your part in Delhi. I advised Delhi of this and they reluctantly consented to resend the requests. They were a constant struggle to deal with, not from a linguistic point of view but purely due to their lack of helpfulness and apparent disinterest in our plight.

At this stage we had been dealing with the office daily for over a week, this often curtailed our plans as we had to be close to a phone to contact the office at least once a day, it also meant that we could not give definite dates to our employers and family as to when we would return.

Virgin in Delhi then informed us that we needed to confirm the Virgin, Delhi to London flight on the 6th of March without knowing whether we could continue our journey that day or not. We were told that we cannot have two bookings on the system or we would risk losing our booking, this forced us to confirm the 6th of March without having a flight for the second leg of our journey.

Our last call to Virgin in Delhi resulted in them offering us a flight from London to Dublin on the 5th of March, considering we were confirmed on the flight from Delhi to London on the 6th we found this laughable but it was presented to us as a serious option.

On foot of this, we were forced to abandon all dealings with Delhi and to contact Virgin in London. Salman whom we spoke to in the office in London was helpful and semi-sympathetic to our plight, I managed to talk through our situation with him and as the Aer Lingus flight on the 6th of March was by now fully booked, our only option was to stay in Heathrow overnight and take the first flight the following morning (7th March).

Obviously this was not an ideal or even a comfortable resolution but at this stage we had absolutely no choice other than to purchase a new ticket from London to Dublin, which we were not in a position to do. So having requested that flight with Salman, he told us to contact him again after 48 hours to confirm the flight. This we did and were assured that we would receive an email confirmation of the flight change. This never arrived despite repeated requests for same.

On arrival in Delhi airport (6th of March 2008) my partner was not permitted to enter the airport as we, due to your incompetence did not have a valid ticket for travel. I, after much persuasion was allowed to enter. I was forced to find a Virgin representative and ask her to explain to the security guard that we were indeed flying that day and to allow us into the airport. We were constantly asked for our ticket whilst queuing for check-in despite having informed each successive Virgin representative that we didn't have one, as it hadn't been emailed to us. Thus our waiting period became more and more stressful. When we finally reached the desk, we were asked whether we wanted our bags checked through to our final destination, I declined, as due to our enforced to stay in Heathrow, I was unsure as to whether our bags would ever arrive in Dublin. This caused confusion as he (check in clerk) had already printed tickets for Dublin without our consent and had to reprint luggage tags. There was a supervisor present whom I asked about the weight restrictions, (as we were travelling light, it did not become an issue) but she assured me that Aer Lingus' allowance was the same as that of Virgin i.e.23KG. On consultation with Aer Lingus however, I was informed that their allowance is 20 KG. Perhaps staff in Delhi could be informed that their "101%" positivity about the luggage allowance is in fact wrong and that they should concentrate more on providing correct information to their customers rather than ridiculing their queries.

Our flight was pleasant as our initial outbound flight had been in December; we found all staff onboard to be friendly and helpful, all our problems lie with the administrative section of your company more specifically the Indian department.

On arrival in Heathrow we went straight to the Virgin desk in terminal three to get a paper copy of our booking. This was not possible as apparently print facilities were unavailable, yet again we were left without any documentation of our booking. Your representative was very helpful and after consulting the booking system assured us that we were booked on the first Aer Lingus flight to Dublin the following morning.
However, on arrival at the Aer Lingus desk we were devastated to be told that we could not be found on their system for the following morning. Eventually a booking was retrieved for a flight at approx 9 pm on the 7th of March, and our initial booking on the 12th of March was also still in the system. Luckily there were seats available for the morning flight and Aer Lingus were willing to transfer our booking. However, we were still forced to wait more than 12 hours in Heathrow in order to take a flight of less than an hour's duration.

In conclusion, due to the reasons outlined above we were totally unsatisfied with our treatment at the hands of your company. Until this point our experience with Virgin had been entirely positive, however we learned to our dismay that Virgin are totally incompetent when it comes to making any changes in one's inital itinary. To reiterate, you may take the example of Virgin in Dehli offering us a flight from London to Dublin on the 5th of March when our flight from Dehli to London was not scheduled to leave until the 6th of March. Once we began to enquire about changing our flights, our whole impression of Virgin changed from a company we had once considered quite consumer friendly to one that was totally incompetent and unable to deal with a simple request, a request that surely arises daily. In our estimation, Virgin has embarrassed itself by allowing rude and unprofessional staff to become the face/voice of it's company. This experience has forced us to reconsider our decision to fly with Virgin and unless we can be assured that steps will be taken to improve your customer relations, we will definitely not be flying with you again. As we are sure you are aware, word of mouth is the best possible reccommendation for any organisation, we however will not be reccommending Virgin, as we would not subject anyone to the stress and frustration that we have endured. We expect to hear from you in near future and once assured that you are taking the proper steps to create a higher standard within your orgainisation we could possibly be persuaded to change our minds.




Hello Ms Ni Arrachtain & Mr O'Neill

Thank you for emailing us about the experience you had on your flight back
home from Delhi.

I was concerned to hear that you were put on hold for so long when you
called to change your flight booking. I know from experience how
frustrating it is waiting to get through to someone.

We know that getting this kind of thing right is an important part of the
experience you have with us. I've contacted our call centre manager about
what happened, so they can make sure we're handling calls well.

I also realise you were unhappy when you had to call on more than one
occasion, as your flight from London to Dublin wasn't confirmed. I also
understand that you felt our staff could have done more to help you. I can
imagine how upsetting this was for you.

I've checked our records and can see that our staff had made alternative
bookings for you and had sent a message to Aer Lingus. But then, the class
that you were booked on was unavailable. They even made alternative
bookings for you to fly on 07 March. I'd also like to advise you that your
booking on 07 March was confirmed for the 0650 hrs flight. I'm sorry if
you were informed otherwise.

I recognise your displeasure with the information you were given by our
groundstaff about your baggage allowance. We train our staff to be
efficient and helpful at all times. I'm sorry if they didn't meet your
expectations on this occasion. I've spoken to the station manager at Delhi
to make sure we get things right in future.

Thank you for giving me the chance to explain. Despite how you feel, I do
hope you will give us a chance to regain your confidence in our services.

Kind regards

Liberata Luiz (Mrs)
Customer Relations Executive

posted by orlagh @ 7:57 pm