Budget Airlines A True Rip Off!!

Geez, we're half way through June and this is my first posting for the month. Either I've been pretty busy with my life or I'm running out of things to complain about. The former seems more plausible and the latter would be a nice to have but hardly reality as far as my whinging ways are concerned. Let's see, we've had the crookish banks raising interest rates again even though the Reserve Bank had not done so. Some of these banks have been caught out holding their office functions in plush hotels like the Sheraton and some even taking staff to overseas luxury trips for meetings as if all the hotels in Australia were fully booked out. We've had oil companies colluding with one another to 'fix' the prices at the bowser and we've had Madonna bribing her way in Malawi, finally getting what she wants with her adoption application by 'donating' $16 million to the orphanages of Malawi and getting a resultant favourable ruling on her case to adopt. Money does indeed make the world go round.

Well I won't be writing about any of those annoying things but something else that has been bugging me for the last couple of weeks. I'm talking about the budget airlines who on the surface appear cheap but use unethical ways to get more money off their unsuspecting customers. Notwithstanding the numerous 'delays' and flight cancellations, I'm referring to something more sinister and morally wrong. I'm referring to a premeditated attempt by the budget airlines to cheat their customers during the booking process.

During the booking process (on their website), one 'Air Asia' will prompt the customer if they want to buy travel insurance? There is an option to click on 'ok' and 'cancel'. Now here is where the dodgy part comes in. If you click on 'ok', you would have declined to buy the insurance and if you clicked 'cancel' you would have agreed to buy the insurance. Obviously, Air Asia have worked out that there would be more people NOT wanting to take on the insurance and would click 'cancel' than there would be people wanting to take it on by clicking 'ok'. So they just reverse the meaning of each button to get more clicks, hence more sales. Although, they have a notice to state that by clicking 'cancel' you would want insurance and by clicking 'ok' you would not want insurance, it can be easily missed if you went about clicking fairly quickly and did not read all the words that appeared on the computer screen. The deceit here is blatantly obvious by using reverse intent. They do not care if you really wanted/ needed insurance or not but aim to deceive to maximize revenue for themselves. Their unethical attempt here to deceive and maximize revenue is nothing short of cheating!

Take one Tiger Airways where you would need to pay a fee of $5 per passenger per sector for using your credit card. This would mean for a family of four travelling from Perth to KL would have to pay $80 for the previledge of using your credit card (there are 2 sectors from Perth to KL for one passenger one way and 4 sectors two ways, 4 passengers return hence would be 16 sectors). Now in Australia it is illegal for businesses to charge customers for using their credit cards if they have no other payment options. However, Tiger has got around this 'little inconvenience' by giving passengers the option to pay via a debit card. We can only guess how many people have taken on that offer. You might as well have a payment option using a Mc Donald's card! You'll probably have more people who have that than a debit card! Now that is $80 for the priviledge of using a credit card!!! I've paid $5, or even $10, but $80 is like saying, they haven't charged you enough on your ticket and this is just another way to make up for the cheap ticket. That's $80 pure profit for nothing!!! No service, no valued added, nothing!!!

Another Tiger Airways scam is with regards to baggage. Taking the example of the above family of four travelling from Perth to KL would have to pay a whopping $160 for 15kg baggage allowance each. That's a huge addition to the cost of the flights, considering the ticket itself is not much more than the cost of the baggage. You do not have the option to choose which sectors you want baggage and which you don't. For example you can't have the option to have baggage from Perth to Singapore and not have baggage from Singapore to KL. Once you click yes on the option, they apply it to all your sectors in effect multiplying $10 by all the sectors on your booking (16 for a family of 4 travelling from Perth to KL), even though you may not want to have baggage on certain sectors. You have to choose to have it all or none at all but most people are somewhere in between. Adding to their perfect form of unethical predatory behaviour, if you noticed that you had added the baggage option and chose to undo the choice, it would allow you to choose the 'No Baggage' option but guess what, the price of the baggage option still remains in the final price. If you did not check this you would have thought that the costs of baggage would have dissappeared since you unpicked that option. You needed to do some fancy clicking before the initial baggage pricing went away. Just another way to cheat you unknowingly.

With all the desperate attempts of the budget airlines to rip you off any which way possible, you probably need to ask the question, are budget airlines actually cheap? With all the additions and all, does it actually work out cheaper? Sadly, the answer to that question is still 'yes' which is probably why people still go back to the budget airlines to be further treated as suckers and continue their unending cycle of budget airline complaining.

Well there you have it. My gripe about Budget airlines and only about the booking process. Don't get me started about customer service, lost baggage, flight postponement, cancellation and 'we only have Maggi Mee left sir' and a host of other 'cost cutting strategies' budget airlines use to make more money.