FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Malaysia Airlines (MH): broken website, US surcharges
Old Jan 3, 2015 | 6:36 am
  #1  
hillrider
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Join Date: Mar 1999
Posts: 12,097
Malaysia Airlines (MH): broken website, US surcharges

A bit of venting here, but maybe there's something in my experience for others to learn from.

MH fares (at least out of SIN) are USD 40 more expensive (on a round trip basis) then you buy them from agents or sites sites that are not in Singapore.

Code:
   WHEN TICKETS ARE SOLD IN SINGAPORE.
[...]                          
   OTHERWISE           
   AND - MISCELLANEOUS/OTHER SURCHARGE OF USD 20.00 PER       
         DIRECTION WILL BE ADDED TO THE APPLICABLE FARE       
         PER ANY PASSENGER.
On a USD 260 fare, that's a lot of money (15%), and makes MH look very uncompetitive on Google Flights, most OTAs, ITA, and any global website.

For a company that desperately needs every penny of revenue it can get, that seems very shortsighted.

And if you think the solution is to buy from their website (which I think it's run by SITA), think again: it's absolutely terrible. Amazingly, it does not offer the best schedules: on my itinerary it only offered connections in KUL that are 3 hour long when there were <2 hour ones with availability -- and using a multi city workaround does not work as it won't allow two segments on the same day. It also managed to sell me a ticket in the wrong name (the one in the profile and not the one I selected -- and the website does not confirm names when it asks for payment, so I didn't know about it until I received the email). It took 61 minutes on the phone plus ~USD 15 (which I am disputing) to fix the problem.

The new CEO will really have a lot of work to do!
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