Restaurant: Customer not charged RM10 for air-cond

Customer was also not charged for booking room for 10 people, it says.

KUALA LUMPUR: The supposed RM10 “air conditioning” charge in a restaurant bill that has gone viral online was in fact waived, says the affected restaurant.

In a report by the Star Online, the Lucky Gardens restaurant claimed that the customer who uploaded the image to Facebook on April 15 was fully aware of the charge but still uploaded it despite the restaurant taking it out from the final charge.

The management of the restaurant said the air-conditioning charge was only billed to customers that dined in the private section of the two-storey premises, which is the only section of the restaurant with air conditioning.

The person who uploaded the bill, they said, had booked the room for a party of 10 and used the space for more than three hours.

“For their exclusive usage of the air-conditioned room, we charged the customer a nominal fee of RM10. He had requested to waive it and we waived it,” the restaurant’s management said.

“We did a favour for the customer by just charging a nominal fee instead of a booking fee, which we waived in the end. Unfortunately, the customer has posted the bill on social media,” the management said in an email response.

Attempts to track down the original owner of the bill have been unsuccessful.

“Some restaurants have charges like that for customers who book a room for a specific event, and it is not against the law as long as it is communicated to the customer,” Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism Minister Hamzah Zainuddin told Bernama.

However, The Star conducted a test and found that the staff did not inform the customer about the charge for air-conditioning.

The report said waiters there did not make the charge clear to reporters when they used the air-conditioned area of the restaurant.

However, no air-conditioning charge was billed in the end. The cashier at the restaurant said the RM10 charge was only billed when a customer used the space for more than an hour.