A student was not happy with a recent fiasco with Tiger Airways. After writing about his experience on Facebook and getting tens of thousands of "Likes" on the post, the airline gave the young man a refund.
Nathaniel Martin was not happy with Tiger Airways bumped him off a flight from Hobart to Melbourne on Sunday. The airline said the flight was overbooked. He took to explain the situation on Facebook, News.com.au reports.
"I went to board the plane and was informed that you had oversold my flight, and that I would have to be 'offloaded' and could not board the plane," Martin's Facebook post to the airline read. "The reason given was that 'I was the last to check in', even though I had booked the ticket a month in advance and was 15 minutes early to check in.
"The federal police officer of 20 years experience helping my family said it was the 'worst case of customer service he had ever seen' and the flight attendant told me to 'get them for every cent'."
Martin was trying to get back to Melbroune as he as an 8am class the next morning. He had to pay an addition $296 so he could fly home on a Jetstar flight that evening. He was left with $500 out of pocket which was a hard hit for a student that earns $9,000 a year.
His parents had to go to the airport to help him pay the fare.
"I am now two hours late, exhausted, $500 out of pocket and with no cash to get home from the airport for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING caused by YOUR INCOMPETENCE.
"Not only do I want a full refund of the $495.45, a full apology to me and my family for the unbelievable inconvenience you have caused and an assurance that you will never deliberately oversell a flight again. I am never flying with your airline ever again and will tell every living soul what you have done to me tonight."
Martin's Facebook post gained 50,000 "Likes" overnight. It got the airline's attention. They called him to apologize and agreed to give him a full refund. Martin deleted the post after the apology.
"Tiger Airways have agreed to refund me the full fare of what happened last night including the other flight I had to pay for to get to Melbourne," he said in a Facebook post to Tiger Airways. "They have been very good to me in responding to this quickly and rectifying their error."
Tiger Airways explained that Martin's case was a rare occurrence.
"Overbooking of flights is common practice in the air travel industry here in Australia and world over - it's a practice put in place by airlines (and other travel and tourism industries) to compensate for an average no show rate," a Tiger Airways spokesperson said.
"While issues in relation to this are extremely rare, we are very sorry to have inconvenienced one of our passengers recently. On review of the situation, we dealt directly with the passenger and resolved his specific situation.
"This is an isolated situation however Tiger does have policies and provisions in place to reaccommodate anyone who is affected by overbooking on the very rare occasion that it occurs, including free of charge transfer to next available flight."
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
