Friday, May 1, 2015

Malaysia Airlines Website - The Hell is This?

Planning a trip, so I checked the prices of airfare and decided even though Malaysia Airlines' tickets cost around a hundred ringgit more or more than a hundred ringgit than Air Asia, I wanted to buy one.

The reason is logistics. I'm going to Bangkok sometime in the near future, so I wanted to go to Suvarnabhumi airport as it is closer to where I want to go. A taxi ride from Suvarnabhumi is around RM110 or I can take a bus for RM15. A taxi ride from Don Mueang Airport - basically the KLIA 2 of Bangkok - would be RM160. Or I can take a shuttle to Suvarnabhumi from Don Mueang or take a taxi to a bus station before I take a bus to where I want to go.

Malaysia Airlines land in Suvarnabhumi while Air Asia lands in Don Mueang. So to keep things simple and clean, I thought I'd take Malaysia Airlines and make up for the difference in fares with land transportation by taking the bus.

So I went and filled in whatever info on their website - a website I had problems with in the past for refusing to take my money - and it went crazy. Again.

Here's a screencap:



I tried the website again and again for maybe a total of an hour, over a few hours. Same error message.

I tried reloading, restarting the whole thing, and nada. Nope. Zilch.

So anyway, I decided to take things to the real world. I went and took a cab, paying RM15 to KL Sentral and plonked my ass down in front of the Malaysia Airlines counter to buy the goddamned ticket. Manually.

I haven't bought a plane ticket this way since... ever. I have never done this.

So keeping my rant and whining to a minimum, I told the nice counter person I wanted tickets to such and such destination, at such and such dates and time. The price quoted to me on the website was RM577 and I wanted the same price or slightly higher.

Upon a cursory check, the price she could give me was RM700++. Later, there was an improved offer of RM600++.

No can do, man. I decided to just fuck it, went home (after paying RM15 for another cab ride) and bought an Air Asia ticket. Air Asia website booked my flight, took my money in 5 minutes, from start to end.

See, the problems with Malaysia Airlines are many and varied. I have no interest whatsoever in their corporate tussle, the share swap fiasco, whatever, man. I don't give a flying fuck.

But this is basic elementary stuff here. I have a website selling comic books to people and if we find an error, that shit gets fixed within a few days - hours if we had nothing to do or not at our jobs.

For a massive company to fuck up their website on three separate occasions when a customer is practically trying to throw money at them is just plain stupid. This is user experience. This is website functionality. This is fucking bullshit.

The fact that I couldn't use the website is one thing - a major thing. Not having the same price for the ticket at the counter is also insane. It's not like Malaysia Airlines is the only game in town. Hell, there's KLM and Jetstar with their shit on offer as well as Air Asia.

The previous problems I had was when I tried to pay Malaysia Airlines using their website and the damned thing wouldn't take my money. It just wouldn't. Straight up wouldn't take my hard earned cash I wanted to throw at them like a hooker in a strip club.

This latest shit is the third time something stupid happened to me while using the Malaysia Airlines website.

I don't know how many other people faced the same problem or how much money is lost simply because the website sucks balls.

I don't know who's in charge up there at Malaysia Airlines, and I don't give a fuck. White guy, yellow guy, brown guy. Whatever. You fix the website, dude.

Just for fucks, I will go to the website again several months from now or maybe next year to book another flight. It better be ready to take my money.

I mean, come on!