FALLING FLAT
I travelled on Singapore Airlines from Mumbai to Singapore in May. My assigned business class seat (16A), supposedly “the most spacious the world has ever seen”, was broken and could not be automatically reclined or, once reclined manually, be re-adjusted back.
As the flight was full, the crew could not assign me another seat. Each time I wanted to adjust it, I had to call an attendant and get up so they could do it – at one point, there were two attendants pulling the seat to make it recline. This continued for the duration of the flight (close to ten times).
I wrote to Singapore Airlines’ customer affairs office asking for either a free ticket on the same route or a partial refund. Its response? A S$150 [£72] in-flight shopping voucher, a S$100 [£48] transportation voucher – in response to a ticket that cost in excess of S$3,000 [£1,342] – and 1,500 mileage programme points (to put it in perspective, a mileage ticket on the same route would require 55,000 points).
I also received a very detailed email on how Singapore Airlines takes maintenance matters seriously. My response? A very polite: “Please save it.”
SINGAPORE AIRLINES REPLIES: Thank you for your recent travel with Singapore Airlines. We are sorry to learn that an aspect of your recent business class experience fell short of expectation; namely due to a defective seat recline mechanism on your outbound flight.
As explained in our original correspondence, we do have a rigorous maintenance programme in place, yet despite pre-flight checks, on rare occasions problems can unfortunately still arise in-flight. Under normal circumstances, our crew would invite you to move seats within the cabin, but on this occasion the flight was full and this was not possible. We are pleased to hear that our crew continued to do all that was possible to assist at the time but regret that their efforts to reset the seat function were not successful.
In recognition of the inconvenience, and to provide an immediate form of compensation, cabin crew offered a S$150 in-flight voucher that could be spent on a wide range of items from our KrisShop catalogue. Following further correspondence, a S$100 transportation voucher and 1,500 miles credited to your partner airline programme have also been offered.
We are sorry that this offer still does not meet with your expectations, and while we acknowledge your request for a refund, we regret that we are not able to offer any further compensation tion on this occasion. We seek your kind understanding on n the matter and hope to have e an opportunity to serve you u better on board a future e flight with us.