profpeabody

Tried to book award tickets for AMS to IAD (one way) for next August today. Easily found the flight availability online but upon completion of passenger info, got an error message. After 3 rounds of this, I called and was told that the availability was there, it was just a problem using the Chrome browser. Told to try again on IE and there should be no problem. Wrong, encountered same error message. Called again and was told it was impossible to book for August 2018 until sometime in September. I recounted the earlier agent's assurance that the flight was open to booking but it fell on deaf ears. The agent would not budge from the too far out to book line. Sooo...hung up. Double checked the web site to ensure I was not crazy about Flying Blue changing the policy to allow bookings one year out and called again. Absolutely no problems at all with this call. The agent booked us on the flight, negated the call in booking fee and confirmed the flight for us. Hang Up Call Again once again saves the day!!

Concerto

I have the feeling all this stuff gets more and more horrible and airline customer service is becoming a total Byzantine, Kafka-esque nightmare. Time was when you could turn up at the airport and be able to speak to somebody competent, whether for ticketing, rebooking or whatever. Now if you do that they will just give you blank stares and stonewall you. So times change, but does it really have to suck as much as this?

johan rebel

It's not only the airlines.

There are exceptions, but customer service nowadays sucks just about everywhere, and almost all the time. Some countries are worse than others across the board because for cultural reasons customer service there has sucked for far longer, if not for ever.

Johan

Ditto

This is not unique to KL, or to airlines for that matter.
At the end of the day, better (trained) customer service reps means higher operating costs, meaning (flight) prices go up, and in todays world most people prefer cheaper prices over quality.