Originally Posted by
bennyblanco
Wow.. so this seems like a common issue with ANA. Not good. I spoke to 3 different levels of management at YVR with the final being the VP of operations for ANA YVR. It was pretty clear to me that the final decision had to come out of Japan and although the entire ANA staff in YVR knew the flight wasn't happening, they were powerless to do anything until Japan HQ said so. I think this is typical of how Japanese typically work, but unfortunately in these rare circumstances it provides for a very poor end-user experience. Too bad.. I will not fly ANA again in the future. JAL it is.
I guarantee the decision had to be made by the ANA HQ in Japan. The staff that is abroad, even the vp of operations has little if any power at all. This is typical with how Japanese companies control everything to the extreme. Perhaps this is why the economy in Japan isn't growing...? I don't have any experience flying JAL outside of domestic Japan tickets, but I can tell you that the JAL staff at Haneda isn't the smartest or brightest either. I've booked Iberia avios reward tickets (before I was at the 90 mark to transfer between BA and Iberia) and I had to explain to them what Iberia airlines was, and kept pointing to the one world alliance poster with the Iberia logo. It only took 3 people, 5 manuals and 1 supervisor to figure out how to pull up my ticket. They also struggled because my confirmation email was in English and most domestic JAL employees can't speak or read any English. I think this is very sad for a country that is promoting tourism and will have the olympics in 2020......