Despite Mango Airlines' claims that it has "ironed out booking glitches", would-be passengers trying to book themselves cheap air tickets ahead of the festive season are being frustrated by jammed call centres and an inaccessible website. The claim was contained in a statement released to I-Net Bridge on Wednesday. Newsmedia has also been trying to make a booking since 08:00 on Thursday, without success. Contacted for clarification, Hein Kaiser of
PR company Marcus Brewster and speaking on behalf of Mango, said: "We told one hundred percent truth and just the truth." That was before newsmedia even put the first question to him.
Kaiser said the bandwidth had been increased four times and that "now things seem to be going better". When newsmedia read some of the readers' comments to Kaiser, he asked that it be forward to him so they "could be contacted and shown where they would get help from".
Kaiser on Tuesday told newsmedia that the call centre was staffed with 130 people and that bandwidth would be increased by 23:00 that night. His statement on Wednesday vaguely claims capacity to the website has been "substantially beefed up and its call centre staff increased", without giving the actual numbers. Some would-be Mango passengers angrily questioned the validity that Mango has ironed out booking glitches. One reader wrote: "I tried to connect but I only get a mango green screen, so much for them upgrading their capacity to process payments if you cannot even get onto the site. Someone should explain to them how network load balancing would increase their web uptime..."
Another said "it is not true that mango has ironed out booking glitches. I have been trying since 08:00 yesterday (Wednesday) and most of the night and again this morning (Thursday). Their website falls over and their call centre is always engaged. I guess you cannot expect any better from a company that is owned by SAA. SAA has never been able to offer decent customer service all these years anyway so their offspring will be the same." Another would-be passenger simply wrote - "It still ain't flying".