‘MAS ruined our CNY’ claim by blogger goes viral

Passenger says she had to wait six hours in airport after her earlier flight was cancelled and she was not informed of the change.

PETALING JAYA: A blog post penned by a disgruntled Malaysia Airlines (MAS) passenger has gone viral on social media.

Other Malaysians have chipped in with their accounts of unpleasant experiences with the national carrier.

The blogger, Audrey, claimed she was “screwed over” by MAS when she, her husband and their two children were not allowed to board the 11.15am flight on Thursday from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to Penang.

The family of four were heading there for Chinese New Year celebrations.

Despite arriving at the check-in counter one and a half hours before the flight, they were told that they were “too late to check in”.

When Audrey’s husband refused to accept the explanation, the MAS employee at the counter allegedly told them that the flight was actually overbooked and that they would have to board a later flight scheduled for 4pm the same day.

“I went to another counter and demanded an explanation and got one – the second counter staff explained that an earlier flight had been cancelled, and they had put the passengers on our flight, effectively kicking us off our flight even though we had done nothing wrong,” she wrote.

Audrey also expressed dissatisfaction that there was no prior notice to enable her to change her plans.

“If we had known earlier, we wouldn’t have rushed to the airport so early. How are we supposed to wait for six hours in the airport with two toddlers?”

MAS, when contacted, briefly said that they had “personally gotten in touch with the affected passenger”, which was Audrey.

Audrey confirmed this and told FMT that MAS had offered a full refund and a compensation of 10,000 mileage points for her and her husband.

“But I told them I don’t want to be singled out for special treatment because of my blog post. I’m not the only person affected by their overbooking this Chinese New Year.

“So I asked if they could also set up a special hotline for people who were left stranded, and work on compensating them. I just emailed them my reply and they have yet to respond.”

At the time of publication, her post had been shared over 3,000 times on Facebook and liked by over 10,000 people.

More than 500 comments were shared on her Facebook post and another 162 on her blog.

Most of these comments came from those who claimed to have had bad experiences with the airline as well.

“They (MAS) screwed my whole family last year on a domestic flight back from Sabah to Johor. They simply told me ‘Oh, we tried to call’ when I noticed my flight wasn’t the same one I’d booked,” a commenter, Caroline Tan, wrote.

She said her original flight was cancelled. So she was moved to another flight, three hours later. She had her toddler with her then.

“They didn’t have the brains to email me or make sure to call until I picked up! It was definitely a last minute notice.

“Worse was when I said I wanted to lodge a complaint… the staff just nonchalantly asked me to go ahead!”

Another commenter, Mabel Chow, wrote: “Wow, I can’t believe MAS still does this to its passengers.”

She said she was on a Jakarta-KL flight in 2008 and booked in business class (for work).

Chow said when she got on the plane, she noticed someone was in her seat. A flight attendant then told her that the flight prior to the one she was on, was cancelled and the passengers were moved to that particular flight.

She claimed she was told to move to the economy class. -FMT