Last year during June, I decided to go back to my home in JHB for the June holidays. I arrived at Cape Town International Airport a little bit late, but on time for check-in and boarding and when I got there, there was an extremely long queue. I thought that since my flight was about to depart in about 40 minutes. I went to the front counter and asked if I could check-in. The person at the counter told me not to worry and that they will announce a final boarding call, so I thought what the heck and I waited in the long queue. As the time drew closer and closer to my flight’s departure, I began to worry and so I went to the counter again. The person then told me that my flight has already stopped boarding and was about to depart.

 I was absolutely furious since they didn’t announce the final boarding call and I was listening to the announcements very closely. they told me they had made the announcement but I sure didn’t hear anything for SA324. They told me to go to the counter at the end and the lady there told me to upgrade my flight for R2000. I was absolutely SHOCKED as I was just a student and I didn’t carry R2000 on me and besides R2000 for just an upgrade for the next flight to JHB was way too much. I then called my father and he phoned SAA main call centre and he also told me to find the SAA supervisor for CPT. I found the supervisor and my father was complaining to her and asked her to help me as much as they can since I absolutely needed to get back to JHB on that day for appointments. The supervisor was not a very friendly person, not to mention she most probably had PMS that day, she was extremely impatient and she got sick of hearing my father asking her to help me and so she slammed my cellphone on the desk and broke it. The supervisor told me to go back to the counter, she said that they had another ticket for me at the counter but when I got there, I was confronted by 2 extremely extremely rude SAA check-in ladies, who called me a LIAR and used unprofessional words such as “eish” “boy, you are a liar” and “wena” and “don’t lie to me now”. They called me a LIAR many times that day and they wouldn’t even hear my side of the story, I mean they didn’t even let me speak for goodness sakes. The supervisor was a liar, she lured me to the counter by saying she had another ticket there for me. SAA didn’t pay for my broken phone, neither did they give me another ticket.

 They lied to me and used rude and unprofessional language at me. They called me a liar which made me furious. I had to call my friend to pick me up at the airport and I bought another ticket for the next day which was way cheaper than R2000. SAA tried to rip me off and they picked on me because I am a minority in this country and they saw an opportunity to make a fool of me. The worst part of the whole experience was the impatience, rudeness, inappropriate language and unprofessional service that is coming from SAA. They need more training if they are to be representing SA in the airline industry. SAA still has a long way to go if they want to provide excellent service, not to mention in time for the world cup.

Tags: Complaints, Customer Service, SAA

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Check-In, Complaints, Ticketing, Voyager. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.