When Iain and I flew to Australia we flew with Singapore Airlines, we had absolutely no complaints about the airline, the service was great all the flights ran on time and everything was very smooth – making our move down under extremely pleasant.
If you haven’t read my recent posts, then you won’t know that I was supposed to have recently enjoyed a two week holiday to Vietnam – obviously, in the middle of a global pandemic, this was cancelled. Only four days before we were due to fly did we find out that I would not be able to receive a visa to get into Vietnam, nor could my Granny, mum, or cousin (who had taken a trip to the UK and was being refused entry back to Vietnam after living there for almost two years).
That Wednesday morning I phoned the airline Scoot, owned by Singapore Airlines. I was on hold for around 2 hours and then gave up. Due to the way the world was beginning to unravel I was not annoyed but decided I’d phone in the late evening when hopefully fewer people were trying.
When we finally got through to somebody, we were faced with a person who was not willing to listen. He told us we needed a doctors note to get our money back on our flight, but neither of us had the virus and were cancelling because we couldn’t get visa’s. The man kept saying;
You will need a doctors note and that’s all I can do.
We were also informed that we could change the date of our trip, a one-time magical date change but the catch was – it had to be within the next 6 months and you had to pay the difference. In 6 months time, we’ll be lucky if we can leave our house let alone start flying anywhere.
We decided to take the loss on the flights, we didn’t want to pay more for a flight we couldn’t guarantee we’d even be able to take.
But that was not the end of that, about a week ago I received an email saying, all passengers who had booked before the 15th of March were able to claim a refund up to four hours before you fly. So why did I receive this email? I had already flown and had no remaining flights with them. I was going to phone up and attempt to request a refund but I didn’t want the stress of this rubbish situation to affect myself any further.
3 days ago I finally received a message back from their Facebook page (I messaged them over 2 weeks ago) with absolutely no helpful advice at all. They did not answer my original question of, can we at least have a voucher instead of a change of date (like Jetstar has offered us), but instead, they said this;
Well I am probably worse off than you! I’m beyond broke…
Try setting aside some of your monthly allowance or pay!
Can you imagine my horror? I lost my job and I am desperately trying to find a new one. I cannot afford rent and I am under the vulnerable category for the Virus. But a huge airline like Singapore Airlines is broke… I didn’t ask for my money back.
Let me just take my monthly allowance of $0 and divide it up into categories. Food, Rent, Activities, Scoot.
When the world is struggling we do not need people demanding pity, companies demanding pity. We need to stand together and help each other get through this, no matter how bad you think you’ve got it somebody else may have it worse, so remain positive and don’t let big companies bully you into feeling sorry for them.
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