Hi, have just come across your website and feel I need to vent my anger at SAA too.

We booked our plane tickets from Durban to EL over 2 months ago. We had booked a Starlight cruise to the Portuguese Island leaving DBN at about 2pm on friday the 31 oct 08.

We dutifully got to the EL airport, check in and boarded the plane on the 7:50am flight to DBN.
My husband happened to glance out the window & noticed that one of the tyres was smooth and had a very “bald” patch with metal sticking through.

A few minutes later a crew member went to inspect the tyre, but was obviously not concerned and the take off procedure soon continued. We got halfway down the runway and the engines started to slow down and we had to return. Apparently there was a fuel filter error warning so we couldn’t take off.

The communication on the plane was very poor. We could hardly hear the announcement by the pilot and were in the dark about what we had to do except get off the plane. Our bags dutifully remained in the cargo section.

All passengers entered the arrivals area, no further communication was given on where we should go or what we should do. We all stood around wandering what the hell was going on. about 15 – 20 minutes later we spoke to the pilot who said a part was being sent from JHB to replace.

At this stage still no communication from SAA. We were now worried about getting to the harbour and missing our cruise. Trips to the information counter proved fruitless as the very unfriendly and extremely unhelpful staff clearly were not interested in our problem.

About an hour later we get told that the flight is delayed and we should collect a meal voucher. We still had no idea if or when the plane would be fixed. Only at about 10:30 did we get official communication of the plane being repaired and that it should depart at about 12:30. AT this stage the arrival at DBN would be too late for us to get on the cruise ship. It took a further 20 minutes to get our baggage off the plane. When advising the lady at the information counter that we were now cancelling the flight due to not being able to get on the cruise, she handed us a piece of paper with the number to call for a refund. She did not take our names or any other info to mark us off the list.

When phoning this number for a refund I spoke to gentleman who took my details and promised to call me back in a hour. this was at 11:30am. I only had the return call at 15:00 that afternoon saying that we could be refunded by it would take 3 – 4 weeks for this to happen. How is it possible to take this long for a refund? The error was a technical one, and SAA’s fault, now we have to wait for our money!

SAA needs to really jack up the crew that are responsible for maintenance and really work hard at uplifting the professional attitude & communication of their staff.

Unfortunately stuck in EL we have no option but to fly SAA, if only there was another more professional Airline that we could use, as I really hate SAA at this stage due to having lost out on our cruise and possibly the cost of the cruise as well as at this stage have had no joy from the cruise company regarding a possible rescheduling of the cruise dates.

Contribution By Gerhard & Heidi

Tags: Communication, Customer Service, Errors, Faults, Refunds, SAA, Technical Problems

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Baggage, Check-In, Complaints, Ticketing. 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.