vulle

My sister-in-law's Korean Mother was booked to fly on paid business class ticket HEL-ICN last Friday April 18. Flight is scheduled to leave at 17.30. Due to technical problems it was delayed and finally cancelled after 22.

Passengers had to pick up their luggage and (at least most) were transferred to Holiday Inn. According to sister-in-law's Mother passengers who spoke English and/or were men were mostly given single rooms, but Asian women who did not speak English (like my relative) were given rooms to share! So my relative was given a room with a single bed (not even king size) to share with another Korean lady! And they were also told that if the room was not acceptable they were free to find another place to stay, this was the only alternative offered by Finnair. And as she doesn't speak English or know her way around Helsinki she accepted this... If this had been me I'd have raised hell and naturally found another hotel and sent the bill to Finnair.

She then took the flight to ICN the next day and arrived home 24 hours late. I would appreciate any tips on how to contact AY. I expect that she has to fight to get the EUR 600 compensation for cancelled flight at least... Any idea if she can get anything more for the lousy treatment in getting the shared room?

I am extremely disappointed in AY. That a passenger in paid business to Asia has to share a room speaks volumes on Finnair's customer "service", I guess they do not want non-English speaking passengers?

lsed

This is disgusting.
Please don't let them get away with this.

remymartin

Unbelievable...

It makes me wonder whether AY *really* called the shots or HI FOM made some selections? It was my understanding thay AY usually put J pax in another property, so were Y pax even worse off? No, I have no love for HI...

vulle

I'll do my best to make them regret this choice

intuition

Worse than I ever heard of, but I am not that surprised after what I've personally seen about AY's handling of irrops.

There is no one to contact AFAIK, you have to go through normal channels, ie submit a complaint. It will take a few months go get a reply, which will consist of an apology, but a firm "we have done everything we could".
If pushed a bit harder you might get a discount voucher for future travels on AY... Expexct 1-200 €.

Can only be resolved by going to court, sadly.

Lappe

My multiple experiences with AY69 being delayed until early morning has been that J pax are sent to Hilton and Y pax somewhere else.
There is of course a lot of confusion and pax do not generally know what the are supposed to do - especially if limited common languages. In my opinion this is where customer care should be top priority, unfortunately every airline I have experiences with just try to get the pax forwarded to be somebody else's problem.

remymartin

I'm wondering if there perhaps was some confusion on whether the person in question was travelling in J or Y. A formal complaint should be filed ASAP through telephone channels.

Whether I were travelling in J or Y I would never share a room with an unknown person. Not being able to communicate with staff would severely impare communicating that, though.

Vulle, here's my suggestion - call up Gold line or whatever, ask to speak to the supervisor and ask him/her that you be contacted asap by someone from Finnair for an official explanation what happened.

vulle

I've asked for the PNR and will contact Finnair this week. I am looking forward to their explanation on how they always take very good care of their valuable customers.

Topolino

Can be worse for a C paying customer?
This happened in Helsinki?!
Can't imagine what would be outside Helsinki if they can't manage it in the hub.

I did this same route (3x in total) with Finnair (in economy). Vast majority of passengers (nearly all) were Koreans. Few Europeans flying to remote pacific islands.. -connecting in Seoul-
Shame on Finnair they can't manage an efficient "Korean speaking ground operator" service!
If they don't care of the Korean passengers ... who are they flying for???
Finnair Flights in summer ex-Seoul are not a bargain.
They attract many pax with the motto "the shortest way to Asia".
If I remember correctly flights on this route started in 2009.
Hard to believe it went so low.


Please inform us about the development of the situation.
Just don't let it go.

Thalassa

One has to wonder why Finnair did not have a Korean speaking FA (surely they must have some on a flight to ICN) out there to sort out the situation.

As for the hotel arrangements, I agree they did not sound satisfactory. However, coming up with 200+ rooms (if the flight was fully booked) with a short notice late on Good Friday (which is a major holiday in Finland) is not trivial.

I hope Finnair does right by the passengers without forcing them to go to court.

Cheers,
T.

intuition

Well, you will never meet the onboard crew in a situation like this. All is handled by the sorry lady who got to serve in AY transfer desk that day.



This actually is no beef for Finnair, as they do it at least 2 times every month (and have done so for a long time). For instance, during january alone they had to find 1500 hotel nights just to accommodate pax for delays on the HKG flight (6 times on this route alone). Easter would complicate it yes, but they surely have deals in place with many hotels as they are a very large buyer of rooms...

GUWonder

I used to see European airlines do this kind of thing at DEL where local women and those who looked like they resided in India were more likely to be asked (by Indian staff of the airlines) to share a room than those who were more obviously likely to be foreigners. [In the December-January period, this used to be repeated rather frequently in DEL due to fog.] I had assumed that the "you must share rooms" was a money-saving move and it largely was. That said, sometimes it was also supposedly done with the expectation that female passenger may feel safer in a room with another female passenger than in a room alone, but I didn't buy that explanation given how foreign women were way less likely to have this happen and how this kind of thing would hit men also who were rather obviously leaving India for the first time or one of the first times. Perhaps the airlines were operating under the assumption that local country citizens/residents have alternative accommodations locally and can manage on their own; but for the middle of the night, I didn't really buy that excuse either -- especially as many of the passengers were not local to DEL.

Unfortunately, airlines too often have a habit of running over people they think they can run over without those people making much noise about it at the time. The squeaky wheel is more likely to get the grease, so perhaps that factors into these situations too.

For those situations where I saw this, it was the airlines calling the shots and not the hotels. The airlines knew how many rooms they were willing to pay for at a hotel, and the hotels knew that going beyond that airline-covered room quota was not going to be reimbursed by the hotels.

These kind of situations seem to have become less discriminatory as each decade passes and as more decent hotel rooms come available in a market.

remymartin

I'm happy to see this thread is a bit livelier, but it goes to show how few people read the AY forum. 557 reads in 2 days, come on! If this were on any bigger OW carrier forum (without naming any), FTers would be at the barricades at HEL by now

GUWonder,
What differentiates your experiences in DEL is that so far it's unclear whether the airline had a (strong) role in asking pax to share rooms, or not. In his post vulle states it was the FDA at the hotel giving out instructions. I wonder if pax had to share the room key, too?

Another thing is the hotel specifically targeted foreign pax and not locals. Either way the whole affair is very wrong and I'm sure it will be thoroughly discussed in Friday's gettogether over, perhaps, some shochu.

GUWonder

When it comes to an airline's IRROPs passenger stays covered by the airline, the number of rooms paid for/reserved by the airline seems to always be a strong factor in how much -- if any -- room sharing is going to end up taking place or be asked/expected. The exception would be when the hotel has lousy inventory management or otherwise decides to breach its agreement with the airline; but in HEL -- with the mentioned hotels -- I have my doubts that the inventory management or agreement-breach would be the problem.

I'm curious what was the mentioned technical problem with that Friday flight from HEL to ICN?

intuition

Irrop at HEL is handled like this: Incoming pax are directed to transfer desk. At desk pax are given info about their new route to final destination, and then told to go to a certain hotel on their own.

It is the hotel that assigns rooms, no AY staff is present for this process (or any other support during the irrop). Hotel has a list of pax that possibly will turn up, but no rooms have been reserved before pax arrives.

In this case AY must have sent more pax to a certain hotel than the number of available rooms. This discrepancy must have been known from start. I can't see any hotel accepting to house a number of pax without telling there are not rooms enough. So AY must have instructed the hotel to "handle the overbooked situation".


AY is, IME, incredible insensitive to the strains an irrop puts on their pax. AFAIK, they truly think they are doing a great job. They think that getting pax a hotel room is something that is above and beyond what the situation is calling for. So I have no trouble believing AY instructed the hotel to solve the situation by bagging pax together as they see fit.