Originally Posted by ozymandias24

This sounds terrible, but not that surprising. South African Airways have pretty bad customer service, and SAA Voyager are even more incompetent for some reason. However, there are ways of getting them to take your issue seriously. In the end, I managed to sort out my problem - I retrieved the 3,000 missing Voyager miles, and am currently in negotiations with them for compensation for the time they wasted (3 months and counting). Their opening offer was an extra 5,000 Voyager miles, which I will likely reject. But we're getting somewhere, slowly! So anyways, here's how to get it done:

1) Forget the SAA and SAA Voyager customer service phone lines. They are all useless. In the unlikely event that they answer the phone, they will not solve your problem. However, it is worth emailing SAA and SAA Voyager customer service with a specific outline of your problem / complaint, and detailed information about how you expect them to address it (and what timeframe).

2) Once they miss the deadline in your email (which they inevitably will), post your problem on the SAA Voyager and SAA Facebook group page and Twitter account. Make it very clear that you gave them an opportunity to resolve the problem privately, within a reasonable timeframe, and they failed. Again, set a new deadline for sorting it out and explain what the solution should look like. If you can include one of their commercial rivals in the complaint (for example, by tagging them on Facebook or @-ing them on Twitter), all the better! I have done this with British Airways in the past, by tagging Swiss International Airlines and noting that they would never treat their customers like this...

3) Continue to post / Tweet every few days to the same Facebook thread / Twitter feed, highlighting that you are still waiting for a solution. Keep doing this until they sort it out.

This puts a lot of pressure on the social media teams at SAA, as this complaint is immediately public, they can see it will remain public until they resolve it, and it cannot be deleted and forgotten (especially on Twitter), like an email can. They are a lot more responsive than the email team and are far more inclined to sort out your problem. This all takes patience (I spent 3 months hassling them on a weekly basis) but it' the only way of forcing them into providing decent customer service.