Asian Spirit my A
< Asian Spirit, now known as Zest-Air, is so far the worst airline I have ever encountered. They cancelled our flight to Batanes on questionable reasons, cancelled my flight to Virac due to ’scheduled maintenance’ and even cancelled my mother’s along with 10 other friends’s flight to Coron for reasons I did not bother to ask. As if it’s not enough that they cancelled the flights, in my case, the Virac flight has been cancelled for two weeks but they never bothered to call me to inform me. In my mother’s case, they transferred the passengers to other airlines like Cebu Pacific and Philippine Airlines and never bothered to inform their passengers. People got the news through word of mouth, from one passenger who bothered to inquire about the flight to another and onto another. In my case, what made it worse is I had to keep dialling their hotline for three straight days to verify if my Virac flight was really cancelled and never got to talk to anyone. When i finally did, I was put on hold for 10 minutes at a time for about five times, and this is not a joke or an exaggeration but I actually fainted for having to stand for almost an hour as I decided to use a pay phone instead of my cell phone, while in the middle of the conversation with the stupidest customer service representative alive. We ended paying almost five thousand in hospital bills because we were worried about the baby and had tests done to make sure everything was okay.
The [stupidest] customer service representative said I was entitled to full refund for all my fully-paid credit card-charged tickets and she said to expect the refund within 30 days.
Since I cannot get the P14,500 back in cash from the credit card company, I decided to shop and charge the purchases to my credit card. That is how I got to find out that travel actually costs so much. The following is the equivalent of 3 round-trip tickets:
Canon Pixma ip1700 (my HP printer refused to turn on and HP informed me they are already at their ‘end-of-support’ for my printer model)
16 window curtains
1K worth of supplies from National Bookstore
Christmas presents for 13 people (yes, I do my Christmas shopping reeeally early)
Birthday present for 1 person
8 place mats
3 sets of kitchen containers
2 shower curtains
2 bathroom mats
2 original limited-edition CDs
and last but not the least, 5 light bulbs. (Reminds me of the jokes, how many whatevers does it take to change a light bulb?)
It turned out to be one hell of a realization. P14,500 converted to things other than airline tickets turns out to be a lot. If the trips have not been cancelled we would’ve spent another twenty thousand more in food, fare, accomodations and other miscellaneous expenses. That is how I came to decide to put a limit to all these travels. A thousand here and there piles up to become ten thousand, and then, it’s not cheap anymore.
Now, back to more Asian Spirit hassles, I would have been happy enough with the purchases I was able to make with my refunded 14,500; except that it has been more than 30 days and there is not a trace of my money. I would like to do some follow-up on this refund, but that involves calling the hotline (it is so hot that you’ll faint when you get on it) again. Meanwhile, my credit card charges are piling up finance charges day after day. Okay, it’s my fault that I tried to get my money back so soon. Can anyone blame me if I was so depressed by this turn of events that I had to resort to hoarding curtains and other household stuff?
Life, as always, more often than not, sucks.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
5 Responses to “Asian Spirit my A”
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