edy4eva

An update:
Two weeks have elapsed since my last call with EY. No emails or calls received from them.
So I called their office in BEY (as I am there atm), IST (tickets are ex-IST) and AUH (HQ naturally) with 1 CLEAR question: 'Has there been any updates on the service charges?'

BEY: After explaining the situation to the seemingly bright agent, Anees, he put me through with his supervisor. His supervisor wanted to hear the full story. After that she proceeded to say that I should contact the person who I spoke to last time. I told her this is an airline we're talking about not some shop around the corner and that I was busy to write down the name of the person let alone trying to track them down in their Manchester call centre. She insisted that it was a 'mistake' on my behalf for not noting down that person's name! Unbelievable. The conversation was going no where specially after she mentioned that since 1 Januray 2012, all over the phone transactions (cancellations, changes, bookings) involve a service fee determined by the agent and a multitude of other factors.

IST: They close for 30 minutes lunch time. At 1pm I called and after pressing 9 to go to the English menu, then 1 for bookings/changes there is a 10 second delay of silence then the call disconnects. Great. Tried this 10 times in the afternoon, no dice.

AUH: I decided to talk to their Arabic team, perhaps I thought I could hear some sense back. The agent, Maryam, was good in wanting to know the full story. But in the end she said it's the 'law/rules' and that there is no rates schedule for service charges as it's more complicated than that. She put me on hold for 15 minutes while she went away to check my cancelled ticket. She came back saying that the 'decision' is that 110AUD will be deducted from each ticket and that someone tried to call me but that my number was incorrect! She did point out it will take 45 business days to get the refund processed (yes that's 9 weeks).

Here's my 2 cents:
- Forget about booking with EY. And if you must then do not book direct, use Expedia or a travel agent. Should you cancel you should get your money very fast and without any hassles. Should you need to change, you won't be paying any charges.
- I wouldn't have even thought about calling them about this if they had a page on their website detailing their service charges. They don't. They don't even bother giving an alternative to their ripoff system.

They are the worst airline I have ever dealt with in terms of customer relations. They have no respect to their own word. Naturally they have no respect towards their customers. NOT an airline to consider flying with.