A holiday experience

In early September we reserved seven seats with Garuda to Lombok. By the end of November, the travel agent requested us to issue the tickets otherwise the reservations would be canceled? We were very surprised also to learn that Garuda had issued a new regulation on Oct. 23 stating that tickets for the season should be three month tickets. This meant that suddenly we had to pay Rp 1,000,000 more for our flight compared to the price issued at the time of reservation. Nice way to generate more income Garuda!

In Lombok, staff of the Senggigi Beach Hotel (an Aerowisata- Garuda company) went to the airport to re-confirm our return flight to Jakarta three days before departure on Jan. 2. We received the reconfirmation code Q8VSX4. On Jan. 2 we went to the airport accompanied by a staff member of the hotel. While already printing our boarding cards (!) a group came to check-in. Only half of them were reconfirmed but they supplied their tickets in which some Rp 100,000 notes were folded. This was witnessed by several other people. Suddenly they stopped producing our boarding cards and we were told that regretfully not enough seats were available for our party of seven people.

The Garuda manager was more than willing to help us if we were willing to help him as well (I just wonder what that means?). They also suggested that my two and a half year old and nine year old daughter should sit on our laps (!) to Jakarta which we refused based on safety reasons. (By the way, why did I have to pay for my two and a half year old daughter a fare of 60 percent of a one-year ticket which cost just US$5 less than a normal adult ticket? And why were two kids aged nine and 16 years old not allowed a student discount?). GA's staff at Lombok told us that we had to accept the option of one person flying with Merpati to Bali and then with GA to Jakarta on the 8 p.m. flight. That person, however was only on stand-by for Bali-Jakarta!

During the discussions our luggage reappeared from the plane and we were all simply thrown off the flight which took off without us! We were then told that over the next few days we could be on the stand-by list and come daily to check whether seats were available! Unbelievable! We told them that we had seen them receive money from the non-confirmed passengers and that was why we were thrown off the plane and that we would go public and file a law-suit if we were not booked on a flight the next day. This was not possible since that particular flight was already overbooked twice!.

After I took photographs of the staff they suddenly gave us boarding cards for the next day's flight. Please note that now another seven other people were just thrown off that particular flight! Upon checking in our luggage the next day the staff of Garuda were extremely impolite again and during our wait we noticed chaos again at the Garuda check-in with many, many very upset and angry passengers. Please note that I have witness reports and photos available of everything as described if requested.

Garuda...your advertisements are promising...when will you start acting accordingly and professionally and how did you "earn" the Indonesian Customer Excellence Award?

LEO LAMMERINK

Bogor, West Java