cricketdog

My husband and I were flying back home from the Seychelles on Emirates via Dubai on February 25. Our seats were in business class (total trip booked using miles). Upon check-in at the Emirates counter in the Seychelles, the attendant told us he was unable to print our boarding passes for our connecting flight on Emirates from Dubai to Paris. We had a 3 hour connection in Dubai so we weren't worried about any timing issues. The attendant told us to pick up our boarding passes at the buisness class lounge in Dubai. Upon arriving in Dubai, we did a little shopping and then headed to the lounge to collect our boarding passes and relax before the flight to Paris.

Upon entering the lounge, we asked the woman at the counter to print our boarding passes. She asked for our itinerary which we promptly provided. She looked at the itinerary and said, "You've missed your flight." I corrected her and told her our flight didn't leave for another 2+ hours. She then took our documents and left the lounge. We sat down at the chairs across from the desk, thinking we'd just wait a few minutes, collect our boarding passes and then grab a bite to eat in the lounge. After 15 minutes, we approached the desk to inquire about our boarding passes. We were told by 2 agents that the woman handling the boarding passes was in "another department" and that she would be returning to the lounge shortly. About 20 minutes later, we made a second request and were once again told to wait. After another 20 minutes or so, we approached the desk again. At this point, we were told that we had to go to the gate to get our boarding passes (I wonder how they treat their economy class passengers???) My husband, a bit confused, asked for clarification and was told again to go to the gate. My husband asked for our documents so we could go check in and the Emirates agent refused to give them to us. So we asked again whether we needed to go to the gate to get our boarding passes. At this point, the agent said no and that she would handle it. We then told her we were going to go into the lounge to grab some food. She said that was OK and that we would be paged when our passes were ready.

Thirty minutes before the flight, we again approached the desk as we were now getting really worried and we had not yet been paged. At this point, a different agent held up our itinerary and asked if it was ours. We said yes. She then proceeded to tell us that she was terribly sorry -- she couldn't figure out why the documents were just sitting there and then informed us that it was too late -- our flight was oversold and we would have to stay the night in Dubai and catch a flight in the morning. Of course, we were very upset. We explained what had happened and how Emirates was completly at fault and that we couldn't understand what was going on. Apparently, the woman handling our request left the lounge and went home for the evening without doing anything. DXB had experienced weather delays that morning and chaos had ensued. We were planning on staying one night in Paris at a 5-star hotel to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We had stayed in Dubai on the way to the Seychelles and weren't interested in staying in Dubai again. Of course, the agent made us feel like Emirates was doing us a big favor by rebooking our tickets and putting us up for the night at the Le Meridien Dubai Hotel, with food vouchers.

We were not happy but tried to take everything in stride. We were forced to cancel our hotel in Paris (with penalties) and suffer the night in a smelly and outdated room at Le Meridien (on a positive note, the food at SukoThai was quite good).

The next morning, we arrived back at DXB. Our connection time in Paris was very short (50 minutes) so we were hoping to get our boarding passes for the connecting flight from Paris to LAX (flying Air France). As luck would have it, the Air France offices didn't open until 1 hour after our flight was scheduled to take off so the Emirates staff agreed to call ahead and have our boarding passes waiting for us in Paris as we deplaned (a nice gesture). Unfortunately, our plane left the gate late because Emirates was kind enough to wait 45 minutes for four connecting passengers whose flights were late into Dubai (never mind the 5 passengers on the flight catching our same flight back to LAX on Air France).

We arrived in Paris 35 minutes late and were hoping that Emirates would shuttle us to the Air France gate to make our flight. Instead, staff met us at the gate and proceeded to tell us we were too late for our connecting flight and the earliest flight they could get for us to LAX was 27 hours later!!

At this point, I could have slugged the Emirates employee but I kept my cool, hoping that we could work through the issues without violence on my end. I explained that this delay would force me to miss another day of work and that we were not willing to wait so long for a connecting flight. I requested Emirates' contract of carriage and at this point, the agent seemed to budge a little. After spending 2 hours walking between various ticket counters, we got a flight leaving for LAX 21 hours later. Emirates put us up at a Courtyard Hotel near CDG and provided us with meals and "free" shuttle bus coverage (guess as business class customers we didn't rate their chauffeur service because the service doesn't provide transportation to CDG-area hotels). As you can guess, I suggested that this was not a good enough remedy and at a minimum, we wanted to stay at a nicer hotel and be upgraded to first class the following day. The agent claimed over and over again that she could do nothing and even attempted to try and get us to pay for the ticket change fees for moving the flight up (it was a whopping 40 Euros per person)!

Of course, the Emirates staff noted that they would keep a record of the problems we encountered and encouraged us to write a letter of complaint so we could at least be repaid for our hotel cancellation fees. What a joke. I am planning on writing a really nice letter and am wondering what kind of indemnification I should request. At a minimum, I'm thinking paymemt for my lost day at work, hotel cancellation charges and long-distance phone fees (for calling my boss). I don't want any Emirates miles as we live in Los Angeles and Emirates doesn't service LAX or any western U.S. airports. I am also thinking of requesting two business class tickets anywhere Emirates flies (we'll get ourselves to NYC if they come through). Does anyone have any other suggestions? I am so burned up about Emirates that I don't even know where to begin my anti-Emirates campaign. Their in-flight services and lounge amenities are very nice but their customer service is by far, the worst I've ever experienced. I was Platinum Elite on Continental for 4 years and have had my share of fun with scheduling difficulties but this experience, by far, takes the cake. The whole time, we were made to feel that the rescheduling done by Emirates was a favor to us and that we should be thankful they were willing to do what they did. Never mind the totally incompetent and irresponsible employee who started the giant snowball rolling downhill for us. Arrggghhh!!!

I still get mad thinking about the whole experience.

Thanks in advance, for your responses and suggestions.

tinkybelle

Emirates do not know the word CUSTOMER SERVICE.

I think you are wasting your time and energy even thinking of writing.
you will get no joy I am sure.
They think they are doing you a favour by letting you fly on their aircraft
good luck
I have been a gold EK member for 2 years.

Singapore_Air

Patience is obviously a virtue you posess!

CHC Kiwi

While I have some support for the the first claim you make, I cannot disagree with you more regarding your second.

To the OP, I have had a similar recent experience and I took the time to detail my concerns to EK Customer Affairs - [email protected]. After just over one month, I received a very comprehensive report along with satisfactory compensation. So please do take up your very serious issues with EK. And good luck.

jedison

Classic Emirates. Decent lounge and OK planes (but watch out for the old business class seats) but god help you if there are any irregular ops. Then you're back in the Arab bazaar, where the customer is always wrong and whoever screams the loudest gets served first. And don't even dream of any coordination or organization. You're in the third world. Don't let the shiny planes and terminals fool you, they didn't build them.

CHC Kiwi

I find your post quite offensive. And you don't have to quote the entire text.

AndyFlyer

I'm sorry but not surprised to hear of your recent trials with Emirates. I have recently flown six sectors with them, and only two left close to on-time. Their lack of customer service on the ground (esp. at Dubai) is now something well-known in the industry and something Emirates certainly needs to work on AS A PRIORITY.

I flew in Firt Class, and it was not good at all. The crew were tired, food hardly edible and it was tough to get a refill of a drink - so much for a crew/pax ratio of 1 to 4.

It was on the ground that issues were truly shocking: dirty lounges, no priority boarding, no priority security (it was there, just not working), ground staff who couldn't answer simple questions, long transfers to aircraft by un-airconditioned bus, no priority bus for premium pax...the list goes on and on. It doesn't surprise me that a customer service rep just walked away as they didn't want to confront you with the bad news that you weren't going to make your flight. When you originally checked-in, did they tag your baggage all the way through to CDG or just DXB? That is usually a good indication if you are on a flight or not. My guess is that because you were on mileage, EK were oversold and you got the bump.

Standard proceedure for EK is to give you an upgrade on a future flight, I doubt you'll get free biz tickets, but it never hurts to tell them exactly what your expectations are from them. I would also spell out exactly what you expected as a premium passenger (like private transfers, rather than shuttle bus service), since they need to be more aware of premium service - something that seems to be eluding them more and more, day by day.

As an aside, I've just flown to the US and several of the crew were former EK staff, one of them a crew trainer. They had all left because they couldn't take the bizarre working practises and the constant delays and complaints by passengers - it was depressing them to no end! I find that very interesting.

Good luck, and do post your solutions! If in doubt, write directly to Maurice Flanangan, and failing that, to Sheikh Al Maktoum.

Fliar

I have only flown EK a few times and that was enough. I had a cheap RTW ex BKK and cancelled after the first two flights and got a refund for the remaining flights. The customer service was the worst I had ever encountered (on the ground) and I was not overly impressed with the inflight service either.

This doesn't help you one bit but just so you know that you are not the only one who has been upset by EK - do write to them. They really need to improve.

EK's story to me is an example of what great advertising can do, without actually delivering.

DYKWIA

Sounds terrible. One question, what happened to your checked luggage? Did they offload it from the original DXB-CDG flight?

Cheers,
Rick

azpyre

The Emirates is rich. They'll give the OP a free first class ticket to compensate. Then what?

I've flown on 6 EK flights. One on-time, the other 5 all late by more than 30 minutes. Lounges are overcrowded. Seats are rather dirty considering new aircrafts. There are EK gate agents who don't know the difference between a boarding pass and a ticket sales receipt. I've heard a male flight attendant telling a fellow passenger that he is not a slave when the passenger asked for assistance to lift his carry-on into the overhead bins.

I hope they'll learn, but I'm not holding my breath. EK's wealth seem to provide temporary band-aids, but not solve long-term problems.

I'm not anti-EK, but i agree on the above quote.

cricketdog

Thank you, everyone, for your responses and support. It's good to know that I'm not alone in thinking that the customer service my husband and I experienced was dismal to say the least.

To answer DYKWIA's question about our luggage, the Emirates agent in the Seychelles offered to check our bags all the way home to LAX but I instead asked that they be checked through to Paris, just in case we did some duty free shopping and needed to put the liquids in our checked bags. We did have the necessary clothing/toiletries in our carry-ons for the remainder of the trip, however so we weren't too worried about missing the checked luggage. Anyway, our bags weren't put on the flight we were originally scheduled for in Dubai (to Paris) and instead made it to Paris on our rescheduled flight. We picked the bags up at the airport. Thinking about it, it's interesting that the bags weren't automatically routed to CDG as tagged, on our originally scheduled flight. I guess the layover was long enough that they weren't loaded on the connecting flight before we checked-in.

Rambuster

Not being issued a boarding pass for the connection flight is usually a bad sign. I guess they were oversold and decided to bump you. The agent in the Seychelles probably already knew this, but did not want to tell you as he would have gotten the grief from you ("not my problem attitude"). Instead he chose to let someone else tell you the bad news in Dubai.

After this kind of experience you would not see me on an EK jet again.

Cedar Jet

Hi there, while Gulf Air are the underdog in the Gulf they are now full partners with American Airlines (earn and redeem points, lounge use etc) and their in-flight service, food and seating are superb. Ground staff have always been eager to assist me when in bother.Although no airline is perfect. You wont get a fancy amenity kit nor 500 video channels but the basics you will get to an exceptional world class level.

I also have to agree that this part of the world is hardly as polished as the west and near enough is always good enough is mostly the attitude. The work ethic is poor generally-otherwise why would sooo many expats be needed there?

Good luck with your future trips and sorry to hear about the traumatic experience.

CJ

CHC Kiwi

While not necessarily disagreeing with much of your general premise, a major reason for a large number of expats working there is the tax free status of their earnings.

Cedar Jet

I totally agree from the expats viewpoint God knows we'd all love to be on some of the packages most are on!, however, the locals are no less capable of doing the same work just chose not to-thus it's not ability rather choice.
CJ