Staggered by airline's attitude
I BOOKED an Aurigny flight from Guernsey to Gatwick on 25 August, after a family visit, to connect with a flight from Gatwick to my home in Spain. Unfortunately, we had an accident with a bird on take-off and for safety reasons, the flight returned to Guernsey and was delayed by nearly four hours.
I have no problem with this. Safety is, of course, paramount.
Equally unfortunately, I missed my connection in Gatwick and had to purchase a new ticket. So far, no problem.
However, on asking for confirmation of the delay from Aurigny so that I could make an insurance claim for the missed flight, I received the following reply:
'Thank you for your email. Please be advised that we may take up to 28 days to respond to all emails and correspondence received and very occasionally longer than this during particularly busy periods.'
Twenty-eight days and very occasionally longer? Staggering.
There is a lot of competition in our world right now and I want to support the little guys. How can a company expect to be taken seriously when they show such arrogance towards their customers? Maybe they will reply sooner, I don't know, but what kind of impression does this standardised email give?
I want to feel proud of my local airline, but this attitude will influence my future ticket-buying decisions.
Of course difficult things happen, but surely the customer deserves a relatively prompt response when problems happen. Who, I wonder, is in charge of customer relations? I suggest some serious re-evaluation of procedures is required.
ANDY CHAPELL,
Molino del Santo,
Malaga.
Editor's footnote: Malcolm Coupar, Aurigny's commercial director, responds: 'Thank you for the opportunity to respond to your correspondent. We want islanders to be proud of their airline and we spend a lot of time listening to our passengers and delivering what they want. Customer service is something we take very seriously at Aurigny and along with safety and reliability, it is the cornerstone of our operation. We acknowledge that 28 days may seem a little long to reply to an enquiry but we feel this is about managing customers' expectations and we would rather give a long response time but reply sooner than give a short response time and be late. At times of weather disruption or technical problems, our customer relations department can be extremely busy but in our experience, we do respond far sooner than 28 days and while many enquiries can be and are dealt with quickly, more complex cases can take longer as they may require detailed investigation.'
