isoldezole
Nov 27, 05, 6:18 pm
Re: Business Practices of Ethiopian Airlines
Addis Ababa has a beautiful, new airport, financed by the World Bank. Apparently Ethiopian Airlines has also acquired some fairly new airplanes. What they definitely do not have are acceptable, ethical business practices.
Why do I say this? Let me tell you my experience with Ethiopian Airlines and you can judge for yourself.
My son and I purchased 4 tickets from Ethiopian Airlines, 2 each from Addis Ababa to Kilimanjaro and 2 from Nairobi back to Addis. We paid full price for those tickets, the airline had our money 3 months ahead of time, and we re-confirmed out flights a few days before starting on our trip.
When we arrived in Addis from Europe we had a more than 4 hour lay-over in Addis. We had our luggage re-ticketed to Kilimanjaro, got our boarding passes and proceeded to the gate area. We were some of the very first people there. We presented our boarding passes, the employee accepted them and told us to sit down; that our names would be called. After a while of waiting I realized that there were two different methods used to treat passengers. Either part of the boarding pass was returned to the passenger or the whole thing was retained by the Ethiopian gate agent. When actual boarding started, only the passengers who had received a portion of their boarding pass were allowed to proceed. Meanwhile the people who had not been called in two hours became quite agitated, my party amongst them. The agent kept saying: “sit down. Trust me. I will call your name. Don’t worry! See all these boarding passes?” pointing to a stack of about 30, “You will be called. You are on standby but you will be called.”
The fact that we were on standby was already an aggravating slap in the face because we had not bought stand by tickets, and we had reconfirmed our flight twice.
As more and more passengers entered the plane it became increasingly unlikely that so many remaining passengers could possibly fit into the already filled plane. We were now 20 minutes past the scheduled departure time. There was no established waiting list. Had there been, we would have been number 1 and 2 since we had been there from the very beginning. We watched as passengers who had arrived about an hour after us and had been told to wait were selected to receive some of the few coveted remaining seats by forking over $100.00 each to the gate agent. Meanwhile, passengers were still arriving 30 minutes after the departure time.
The agent just said, “where have you been? Hurry up,” and let them board.
While still being told to wait, and assured that we would be called, the airplane had in fact already departed, leaving us and about 15 other passengers behind, all of them plenty upset. We were told not to worry, there would be another plane the next day.
The next hour and a half were spent waiting while an Ethiopian Airlines employee did extremely slow paperwork (no explanation to us!) calling each one of us, one at a time, apparently to arrange for some kind of hotel. I insisted that whatever the next scheduled flight would be, I wanted our boarding passes now, with definite seat assignments. I did get those passes and then we were loaded into a bus and driven to some “hotel” nearby. This turned out to be a hotel with one communal bathroom, no toilet paper and a broken door lock for both the toilet and the room which we were assigned. When I looked at the sheets of the beds there were black bugs walking between the sheets. I wanted to return to the airport. At least the airport didn’t have any bugs, and had bathrooms that were clean and lockable. The hotel refused to call a taxi. Instead, they promised us a “better room.” What I only realized a little later was that the “better” room already had occupants from the same group of left-over passengers. It was a family of 4 young siblings. They had previously protested vehemently because between the 4 of them they had only been given one room. My son and I had been given 2 separate small rooms. When the hotel clerk marched us off to the “better” room we encountered the 4 siblings who triumphantly were going into the direction we had just come from. The hotel clerk, as I realized too late, had simply switched the two protesting groups around. I didn’t see any bugs on this recently used bed, but we didn’t undress.
It was now 6:00 am and we would maybe sleep 3 hours maximum to be ready at the scheduled pick up time. My son’s bed bug bites that he incurred during those three hours have not quite subsided to this day, three weeks later.
As if this had not been bad enough, our second attempt to get to Kilimanjaro with Ethiopian Airlines was even worse. We entered the airport confident that this time there would be no problem since we had already been issued boarding passes with seat numbers.
Initially, this confidence seemed justified. Again, we were there very early, showed our boarding passes, had the larger part taken off by the gate agent and were handed the remaining part. So far, so good. However, five minutes later, the gate agent approached us, called our name and claimed he needed to check something on our boarding passes. We naively handed them to him. He walked away with them and then he wouldn’t give them back to us. “Sit down. I’ll call your name. Trust me,” was the familiar refrain. I did not move from the agent’s side, demanded an explanation, and kept asking for our passes. He ignored me completely. My son tried several times. No success. When I insisted on being given an explanation the agent said he had his own reasons, they were for his own benefit. The only sense I could make out of this answer was that, like the guy the night before, he was waiting to be given a bribe.
Meanwhile, a number of people were sitting there having been told: don’t worry, we’ll call your name, just wait – just as we had been the night before. In particular, the American lady next to me had been given this brush-off. I told her what had happened to us and wished her luck. She had a cell phone and promptly called her travel agent who confirmed that of course, her ticket had been re-confirmed. She talked to the ticket agent, she was agitated, the “sit down and we’ll call you” made her more agitated. She never made it onto the flight.
A second gate agent showed up, so my son tried his luck with him. This second agent, after hearing the story, consulted with the first agent and then told my son that his boarding pass was down stairs. My son said, “you are wrong, it is right here,” and he snatched it off the desk. The one who had taken it from us, Mr. Gatamay Zametkan, grabbed the passes and my son wouldn’t let go. The agent threatened to call security and my son urged him to do so. Of course, security was not called. In the pulling contest we ended up with one boarding pass, the agent with the other. Now he really wouldn’t let go of the second pass.
I decided, since I now had one pass in hand I could ask permission of the gate security people (who were completely unaware of what had been going on) to go outside the gate area and use the bathroom. They said “okay.”
Once outside the gate I was able to find an employee to ask for a supervisor. She wanted to know what the problem was and I told her. I showed her my one boarding pass. At first she couldn’t understand what I was talking about since I was in possession of a valid pass. It took several repetitions until she understood that even though we had had those valid passes, Mr. Gatamay Zametkan had taken them away from us and had not been willing during the last two hours to return them to us. She assured me that she would talk to him on the phone and she did. She then sent me back in and said that everything would be okay. Back on the inside, Mr. Gatamay Zametkan still would not surrender our second pass. I figured that at this point his ego just had to show me who was in charge. Finally, after an additional 20 minutes, he surrendered. The American lady waiting next to us never made it, however.
Ethiopian Airlines has several separate problems:
1. The airline engages in completely sleezy, unethical business practices. It obviously oversells the seats, not just by a few, but by about 20 seats per flight.
2. They have no system in place for offering incentives for passengers to voluntarily give up their seats in exchange for such incentives.
3. They keep lying to their customers, not divulging the sad truth that those customers will most likely be left behind, irrespective of the fact that the customer has paid the airline for transportation on a certain day.
4. There is no transparent system in place to have a numbered waiting list, so that some degree of fairness is preserved.
5. Because the system is so arbitrary, it makes it easy for corruption, ie: “give me extra money and you’ll be one of the lucky ones.” We saw that corruption operative on both days.
Since we had so many hours to observe the system in operation, I noticed the following: when picking customers to give seats to, they prefer customers who had paid the maximum price, to the end of the flight. If nobody bound for Kilimanjaro is allowed on the plane, everybody goes all the way to Dar-es-Salam, which is a more expensive ticket, and the plane no longer even has to land in Kilimanjaro. The other people who don’t have problems getting onto the local flights are people who elected to buy a transatlantic ticket or one across the Indian Ocean.
We finally got to Kilimanjaro and were barely able to catch up with our Safari.
Meanwhile, in the States, good old Ethiopian Airlines notified my other son that they had decided to cancel our return flights, again supposedly because we had not re-confirmed. Again: take the suckers’ money and then tell them it’s their own fault that the airline has crooked business practices. They can always sell those seats a second time.
We had indeed re-confirmed, luckily by e-mail. There was a copy of that e-mail. After talking to the airline for two hours, Ethiopian Airlines graciously agreed to re-instate our flights.
When we got back to Addis we spent 3 days at the Sheraton. There we met a group of Americans whose flight to Kilimanjaro on Ethiopian Airlines had just been cancelled. Only four people were able to fly (those with transatlantic tickets on Ethiopian Airlines). The others had to wait until the following day. The following day they were told to wait two more days. We left before we heard the final outcome.
I came away with the following lesson: whatever you do, do not buy a ticket on Ethiopian Airlines! If you do, you’ll be really sorry.
Addis Ababa has a beautiful, new airport, financed by the World Bank. Apparently Ethiopian Airlines has also acquired some fairly new airplanes. What they definitely do not have are acceptable, ethical business practices.
Why do I say this? Let me tell you my experience with Ethiopian Airlines and you can judge for yourself.
My son and I purchased 4 tickets from Ethiopian Airlines, 2 each from Addis Ababa to Kilimanjaro and 2 from Nairobi back to Addis. We paid full price for those tickets, the airline had our money 3 months ahead of time, and we re-confirmed out flights a few days before starting on our trip.
When we arrived in Addis from Europe we had a more than 4 hour lay-over in Addis. We had our luggage re-ticketed to Kilimanjaro, got our boarding passes and proceeded to the gate area. We were some of the very first people there. We presented our boarding passes, the employee accepted them and told us to sit down; that our names would be called. After a while of waiting I realized that there were two different methods used to treat passengers. Either part of the boarding pass was returned to the passenger or the whole thing was retained by the Ethiopian gate agent. When actual boarding started, only the passengers who had received a portion of their boarding pass were allowed to proceed. Meanwhile the people who had not been called in two hours became quite agitated, my party amongst them. The agent kept saying: “sit down. Trust me. I will call your name. Don’t worry! See all these boarding passes?” pointing to a stack of about 30, “You will be called. You are on standby but you will be called.”
The fact that we were on standby was already an aggravating slap in the face because we had not bought stand by tickets, and we had reconfirmed our flight twice.
As more and more passengers entered the plane it became increasingly unlikely that so many remaining passengers could possibly fit into the already filled plane. We were now 20 minutes past the scheduled departure time. There was no established waiting list. Had there been, we would have been number 1 and 2 since we had been there from the very beginning. We watched as passengers who had arrived about an hour after us and had been told to wait were selected to receive some of the few coveted remaining seats by forking over $100.00 each to the gate agent. Meanwhile, passengers were still arriving 30 minutes after the departure time.
The agent just said, “where have you been? Hurry up,” and let them board.
While still being told to wait, and assured that we would be called, the airplane had in fact already departed, leaving us and about 15 other passengers behind, all of them plenty upset. We were told not to worry, there would be another plane the next day.
The next hour and a half were spent waiting while an Ethiopian Airlines employee did extremely slow paperwork (no explanation to us!) calling each one of us, one at a time, apparently to arrange for some kind of hotel. I insisted that whatever the next scheduled flight would be, I wanted our boarding passes now, with definite seat assignments. I did get those passes and then we were loaded into a bus and driven to some “hotel” nearby. This turned out to be a hotel with one communal bathroom, no toilet paper and a broken door lock for both the toilet and the room which we were assigned. When I looked at the sheets of the beds there were black bugs walking between the sheets. I wanted to return to the airport. At least the airport didn’t have any bugs, and had bathrooms that were clean and lockable. The hotel refused to call a taxi. Instead, they promised us a “better room.” What I only realized a little later was that the “better” room already had occupants from the same group of left-over passengers. It was a family of 4 young siblings. They had previously protested vehemently because between the 4 of them they had only been given one room. My son and I had been given 2 separate small rooms. When the hotel clerk marched us off to the “better” room we encountered the 4 siblings who triumphantly were going into the direction we had just come from. The hotel clerk, as I realized too late, had simply switched the two protesting groups around. I didn’t see any bugs on this recently used bed, but we didn’t undress.
It was now 6:00 am and we would maybe sleep 3 hours maximum to be ready at the scheduled pick up time. My son’s bed bug bites that he incurred during those three hours have not quite subsided to this day, three weeks later.
As if this had not been bad enough, our second attempt to get to Kilimanjaro with Ethiopian Airlines was even worse. We entered the airport confident that this time there would be no problem since we had already been issued boarding passes with seat numbers.
Initially, this confidence seemed justified. Again, we were there very early, showed our boarding passes, had the larger part taken off by the gate agent and were handed the remaining part. So far, so good. However, five minutes later, the gate agent approached us, called our name and claimed he needed to check something on our boarding passes. We naively handed them to him. He walked away with them and then he wouldn’t give them back to us. “Sit down. I’ll call your name. Trust me,” was the familiar refrain. I did not move from the agent’s side, demanded an explanation, and kept asking for our passes. He ignored me completely. My son tried several times. No success. When I insisted on being given an explanation the agent said he had his own reasons, they were for his own benefit. The only sense I could make out of this answer was that, like the guy the night before, he was waiting to be given a bribe.
Meanwhile, a number of people were sitting there having been told: don’t worry, we’ll call your name, just wait – just as we had been the night before. In particular, the American lady next to me had been given this brush-off. I told her what had happened to us and wished her luck. She had a cell phone and promptly called her travel agent who confirmed that of course, her ticket had been re-confirmed. She talked to the ticket agent, she was agitated, the “sit down and we’ll call you” made her more agitated. She never made it onto the flight.
A second gate agent showed up, so my son tried his luck with him. This second agent, after hearing the story, consulted with the first agent and then told my son that his boarding pass was down stairs. My son said, “you are wrong, it is right here,” and he snatched it off the desk. The one who had taken it from us, Mr. Gatamay Zametkan, grabbed the passes and my son wouldn’t let go. The agent threatened to call security and my son urged him to do so. Of course, security was not called. In the pulling contest we ended up with one boarding pass, the agent with the other. Now he really wouldn’t let go of the second pass.
I decided, since I now had one pass in hand I could ask permission of the gate security people (who were completely unaware of what had been going on) to go outside the gate area and use the bathroom. They said “okay.”
Once outside the gate I was able to find an employee to ask for a supervisor. She wanted to know what the problem was and I told her. I showed her my one boarding pass. At first she couldn’t understand what I was talking about since I was in possession of a valid pass. It took several repetitions until she understood that even though we had had those valid passes, Mr. Gatamay Zametkan had taken them away from us and had not been willing during the last two hours to return them to us. She assured me that she would talk to him on the phone and she did. She then sent me back in and said that everything would be okay. Back on the inside, Mr. Gatamay Zametkan still would not surrender our second pass. I figured that at this point his ego just had to show me who was in charge. Finally, after an additional 20 minutes, he surrendered. The American lady waiting next to us never made it, however.
Ethiopian Airlines has several separate problems:
1. The airline engages in completely sleezy, unethical business practices. It obviously oversells the seats, not just by a few, but by about 20 seats per flight.
2. They have no system in place for offering incentives for passengers to voluntarily give up their seats in exchange for such incentives.
3. They keep lying to their customers, not divulging the sad truth that those customers will most likely be left behind, irrespective of the fact that the customer has paid the airline for transportation on a certain day.
4. There is no transparent system in place to have a numbered waiting list, so that some degree of fairness is preserved.
5. Because the system is so arbitrary, it makes it easy for corruption, ie: “give me extra money and you’ll be one of the lucky ones.” We saw that corruption operative on both days.
Since we had so many hours to observe the system in operation, I noticed the following: when picking customers to give seats to, they prefer customers who had paid the maximum price, to the end of the flight. If nobody bound for Kilimanjaro is allowed on the plane, everybody goes all the way to Dar-es-Salam, which is a more expensive ticket, and the plane no longer even has to land in Kilimanjaro. The other people who don’t have problems getting onto the local flights are people who elected to buy a transatlantic ticket or one across the Indian Ocean.
We finally got to Kilimanjaro and were barely able to catch up with our Safari.
Meanwhile, in the States, good old Ethiopian Airlines notified my other son that they had decided to cancel our return flights, again supposedly because we had not re-confirmed. Again: take the suckers’ money and then tell them it’s their own fault that the airline has crooked business practices. They can always sell those seats a second time.
We had indeed re-confirmed, luckily by e-mail. There was a copy of that e-mail. After talking to the airline for two hours, Ethiopian Airlines graciously agreed to re-instate our flights.
When we got back to Addis we spent 3 days at the Sheraton. There we met a group of Americans whose flight to Kilimanjaro on Ethiopian Airlines had just been cancelled. Only four people were able to fly (those with transatlantic tickets on Ethiopian Airlines). The others had to wait until the following day. The following day they were told to wait two more days. We left before we heard the final outcome.
I came away with the following lesson: whatever you do, do not buy a ticket on Ethiopian Airlines! If you do, you’ll be really sorry.