Wed like to inform our friends or other people who may want to
choose budget airline for travel about the unhappy event as we will
describe below. Please be noted that we mainly talk about the Tiger
Airways (Tiger for short) company here.
On the late December, we eight people planned to travel to Phuket
on the late January and booked one way air tickets from Tiger
(Phuket - Singapore), and the price that time was s$42 each (the
departure ticket from Singapore to Phuket is bought from another
budget airline A). Unfortunately, the tsunami happened during
Christmas and Phuket was severely impacted. Due to the safety
concern, we decided to cancel the trip to Phuket. When we requested
such change to both airlines, A agreed us to change destination,
time and name without any penalty. But Tiger originally said we
need pay for penalty for any change. After we negotiated with them
for several times, they accepted our requirement which was quite
reasonable at the first place, because it was not because of our
fault to change the trip.
Then we decided to travel to Bangkok instead and the return date
was fixed on Feb, 27. From Jan 24, we started to request such
change. After four days on Jan 28, Tiger requested us to offer
passengers name details. But that time three of us quitted and
another three people joined. So we sent out change request again
with new passengers information and the date was still the same.
After that, we kept sending emails to enquire and waited for
18 days before Tiger replied (Feb 15) and this
reply came after we sent fax to them. We presented our information
again as required. Then, while we kept sending emails and fax to
enquire the progress, Tiger made us wait for another 9
days to Feb 24, which was the time for us to depart. On
Feb 24, we called, emailed, and faxed a lot of times to Tiger to
request their confirmation of return tickets. At the last minute,
they confirmed it but said that the original flight we booked was
not available at that time and we had to pay top up for the current
flight, which means each of us should pay s$80 plus 8
more to make the trip. We were very angry but had no
choice because time was so limited that we could not book another
flight to be back, but just had to pay for it. 
We strongly doubt that Tiger intentionally deferred our ticket
change processing to get more payment from us. Actually the flight
we took (TR109) was filled less than 1/3 of all the
seats. If this is because of the low efficiency of Tiger
officers, they should still follow the original flight information
for reference. But their efficiency was so ridiculously low! If we
didnt push them to confirm quickly on the last day, we may not be
able to get the return tickets and may probably abandon the trip!
We have complaint to the Tiger officers, but they said they had no
way to resolve it. Since the customer service people said they had
to refer this change to their management before confirmation, we
doubt that management people of Tiger intentionally instruct their
officers to deal with our change in this way to charge higher price
from us. Although this amount of top up may not be a big deal for a
lot of people, we strongly feel that our rights have been badly
violated. And it is very irresponsible for Tiger to treat their
customers in this way. Compared with airline A, who agreed us to
change without penalty at the first time after tsunami and
processed the changes for us just within half an hour through call,
Tiger neither provides a direct phone call no to customer service
department nor proceeds the request rapidly. More intolerable, they
even showed much reluctance to reply by email! Tiger really places
itself as a very untrustworthy airline company.
We want to inform all of our friends and people we may not know
about this issue. Please be noted that no matter due to low work
efficiency or intentional abuse, Tiger has left a bad image with us
and we wont choose it for future travel any more. Hope all of you
will not encounter such problem.
