Category: Idiot Overlords

KLM Customer Service is Worse Than Shit

I’m not even going to bother with them anymore. They still don’t address the main issue that I have raised, and are now washing their hands off the matter.

Dear Mr Shawn,

We write further to your comments on Twitter. We are sorry to learn that you are disappointed and dissatisfied with our answer to your previous email.

Technically, names on tickets must match the passenger’s passport. The name you enter on the Traveller Details Screen must be the same as on your passport. Tickets cannot be transferred to another traveller. Therefore, name changes are not permitted.

Please be advised that KLM as well as most airlines treat a name change as a cancellation, to which standard conditions and charges would apply.

KLM accepts no responsibility for any errors or omissions made by a passenger. As such, we shall not be responsible for any consequences of you being refused boarding or immigration control.

However, for minor errors made (wrong spelling) and need to minor name change, KLM will change for you with a fee to change, as per our website.
”If your name or other personal details have been misspelled, please contact us within 24 hours of booking. ”

How can I change the name on my ticket?
If your name or other personal details in your booking have been misspelt, please contact the KLM Service Centre. You may need to pay a fee to change your name.

As per the above, ”you may need to pay a fee to change your name”, if you need to add a second middle name, the name change fee applies. As such, we wish to advise that KLM is not in a position to waive the name change fee in question.

We understand that this experience has left you with a less than good impression. However, we hope that it will not deter you from using KLM on your future travels.

Yours sincerely,
Jessie Y.
Asia Pacific Customer Care
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

Please do not reply directly to this e-mail. This e-mail address is unable to receive incoming messages so your new communication will not be delivered to us.

Should you need to contact us again, please do so via our webform which you can find on our internet site. Please mention your reference number 6140549001 in the designated field at the bottom of the form.

Notice that while she raised the fact that there exists a 24-hour name-change policy, there is no mention of charges there. In fact, if I was willing to pay those charges, I can make the name-change at any time, not just within the 24-hours. I could even make the name change today.

Like I have said before this. Just fucking tell me that I was wrong and that there is no such policy that a name-change within 24-hours is waived of the fee – because this is what I was made to understand when I called in and asked the customer service.

You all be your own judge on how KLM treats its customers. I have produced their replies ad-verbatim. I have already decided to never fly KLM again for the rest of my life and will encourage others in my circles to never do so either.

PS: At least they’ve gotten rid of the broken link instead of asking me to open it up in a new browser. Idiots.

KLM Customer Service is The Shit

You do realise that people can detect when something is not quite right. I’ll reproduce KLM’s official email reply to me after I lodged a customer complaint. I wonder if they had even bothered to even check the issue.

Claim No6117022001 KL811 / 31DEC2012

Dear Mr. Shawn,

Thank you for taking the time and trouble to detail your experiences to us.

Passengers are offered a wide variety of fares and each fare has restrictions associated with it depending on the actual amount paid. Before buying a ticket online, passengers need to verify the terms and conditions of ticket about to purchase to make sure it meets your requirements.

As the ticket flexibility changes according to the fare, after you have completed the purchase a change of program is not always possible. A change of booking or of itinerary might require a penalty payment and, in the event of cancellation, not all fares are refundable. Changes to different names are not permitted.

However, an immediate name change is required under such circumstances and you are liable for paying standard change fees as stipulated by the purchased fare rules.

Please find the details below
How can I change the name on my ticket?
If your name or other personal details in your booking have been misspelt, please contact the KLM Service Centre. You may need to pay a fee to change your name.
If part of your journey will be with a partner airline of KLM, it may not be possible to change your name.
You can always view your booking details by logging in to Manage my Booking.
We note that you wish to add a second middle name, Tan/ Shawn Ser Ngiap, instead of Tan/Shawn. In this case, as advised by our reservation agent, the name change fee applies.

While we understand your disappointment over this matter, the name change fee in question is a valid fee for the change that you requested. We are sorry for any disappointment that this has caused.

We do hope that despite the disappointment, the above explanation will help soften the negative impact of this situation.

Best regards,
Jessie Y.
Asia Pacific Customer Care

Should you wish to reply to this e-mail, or check the status of your request, please use the following link to send us your message: click here

Noticed anything odd?

What circumstances do they mean, in the third paragraph? There’s a disconnect between that paragraph and the others. This typically indicates that the reply was probably edited out. There might have been a paragraph before that, which talks about such circumstance. Whatever the circumstance was, I have no idea what they mean.

Also, they actually failed to deal with the fact that I had contacted them and requested for a name change within 24-hours, which according to their earlier customer service, meant that I did not have to pay for a name change, which was the reason why they had to raise my issue up in the first place. This was what was asked of me and printed on the ticket – to inform them within 24-hours. Nobody seems to be able to give me a straight-forward reply on this. Just go on record to tell me that there is no such thing and that I had imagined it all and I’ll go away.

And the final straw is that the reply link doesn’t even work as  I get a 404 error with a nice picture of a sakura-like flower when I click on in. When I checked the URL, it was a straight-forward anchor href with a base64 encocded string at the end. When I contacted KLM on twitter about it, their reply was this:

@sybreon We regret to hear this, Shawn. Have you tried the link in a different browser?

I feel like responding to them with a tweet of “did you try it with a browser on your end? did it work?” Seriously, their customer service is the shit.

Instead of softening the negative impact of the situation, I’m sorry but the email reply has actually worsened it. It leaves my main question unanswered, and it raises new suspicious ‘circumstances’. Furthermore, the reply link doesn’t work and I cannot reply to the email to follow up on the matter.

So, like I mentioned earlier, my current experience with KLM is turning out to be a nightmare. I will never fly with them again for the rest of my life.

KLM – you suck, hard.

KLM Sucks Ass

English: Logo of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
English: Logo of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have tickets to Berlin from KLM. The name on the tickets are “Shawn Tan” as per first name, last name proper. However, the name in my passport is my full name – typical Malaysian Chinese name with the extra bits at the end.

Their terms state that: “If your name or other personal details have been misspelt, please contact us within 24 hours of booking”, which I did. I used their own website system to contact them about 21 hours later. I have copies of the email acknowledgement with the date/time stamps of course.

In the email (KMM24923872V73688L0KM), I explained to them that the name on the tickets are my first name and last name; and also gave them my full passport name. I asked them if it would cause any problems and instructed them to make the necessary changes if it might.

However, they only responded to me almost a week later to ask me to call up their local office, which I promptly did on receiving the response. My call was handled and I was told that I would need to pay a RM150 name-change fee.

I check with their staff that the conditions are that within 24 hours it was not necessary. Their staff asked me if I had contacted them within 24 hours and I said that I did email them. So, they investigated the email and told me that they would have to raise the issue up and contact me back later.

Their staff called me up the next day to tell me that after raising the issue to KLM Malaysia‘s office, the decision was that I still had to pay the RM150 name-change fee.

I’m sorely pissed as I had done everything according to the terms and conditions, and using their own online systems. It is not my fault if they responded to it nearly a week later. I don’t understand why I’m still being made to pay the name-change fee. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not my fault!

Their staff who called me back did not have a reason to give me either except to insist that I had to either pay the name-change fee or not change my name. She did originally highlight to me the risk of not putting in my full name is that I might face immigration problems.

KLM, it is not a good idea to cast fear and uncertainty in your customers. Now, I’m pissed and feel like they’re screwing me over and then causing me worry that I might be kicked out by immigration. All in all, this was a bad customer experience for me with KLM.

This is actually the first time that I’m flying KLM and it will definitely be my last!

Questionable SETARA 2011

Malaysian Qualifications Agency
Malaysian Qualifications Agency (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our local Malaysian ranking for undergrad teaching quality of local universities, SETARA, was recently released. I thought that it would be fun to check it out to see how things have changed since the last ranking exercise.

Some universities that improved tremendously from SETARA09 to SETARA11 are:

  • Binary University of Management and Entrepreneurship – vaulted from Tier 3 (Good) in to Tier 5 (Excellent).
  • Wawasan Open University, Open University Malaysia, SEGi University – parachuted in at Tier 5 (Excellent) from being previously unranked.
  • TATi University College, University Pertahanan Nasional Malaysia, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan – moved into Tier 4 (Very Good) from being previously unranked.

Needless to say, I was shocked.

I don’t know the detailed criteria nor methodology that was used during the survey but it shocked me that some of the universities that made it to Tier 5 (Excellent) were not what I would have expected. Granted, I am no expert in local universities nor their standards but some of the results just beggar belief.

I’m not trying to single anyone out but, two of these Tier 5 universities are classified as open and distance learning institutions. I do not understand how they could achieve excellent teaching quality when the students are not even in the same room as the lecturer. I know that internet based learning is all the craze these days but even places like MIT do not consider their open learning systems at par with their in-house teaching, yet.

Some of the other Tier 5 universities are virtual unknowns. Again, I do not claim to know all the universities in Malaysia (there are just too many to keep track of these days) but some of them are total unknowns. Some are even the butt of many jokes on education quality in Malaysia, the kind of university that you would not want people to know that your child was attending.

Furthermore, more than half of the universities ranked are of Tier 5 level while there is only one university at Tier 3 (Good). I would have expected something like this to be more normally distributed as it was in SETARA09. When I see such heavily skewed results, I tend to question the accuracy of the study. Something just does not smell right to me, statistically speaking. It’s highly improbable that the majority of institutions is Excellent.

Brings to mind an XKCD comic:

My personal opinion of this is that some of these Tier 5 universities must have gamed the system. I do not blame them for doing that though, as the SETARA rankings affect many aspects of a university including fees. Nobody would want to pay top dollar to study in a Tier 4 university when they can study in a Tier 5 one for cheap. So, I expect some of these virtual unknowns to raise their fees next year!

I hope that the MQA would take the effort to toughen and tighten the criteria for ranking in the next exercise. We need a ranking system that truly reflects the teaching quality of local universities. It would serve as a useful guide to parents, only if they actually trust the accuracy of the exercise. I don’t think that any parent would agree that more than half our local universities are Excellent!

I think that a lot of people who see the list would think and start to question the SETARA rankings and methodology. While I agree that there are always flaws within any sort of ranking system, when this happens, it will become more fodder for local coffee shop talk. We know that some of these Tier 5 universities deserve to be there while others are downright questionable.

Personally, I’m not going to even bother with SETARA11. I’ll stick to the more normally distributed SETARA09 rankings for now.

Sumptuous Erotica

Erotica #1
Erotica #1 (Photo credit: Tiws)

Disclaimer: Some adult thoughts ahead.

Update: I highlighted some legal issues in my Law blog.

A cross-border international scandal involving a couple of young Malaysians seem to have erupted in our prim and proper neighbour, Singapore.

In it, stars two very young people – Alvin Tan Jye Yee, a Law student in the National University of Singapore, and an ASEAN scholar; Vivian Lee – his girlfriend, a Malaysian. There doesn’t seem to be very much to say about these two, since they are still so young after all.

The scandal involves a couple of single consenting adults having sex, which thankfully nobody is throwing the morality hammer at yet. The issue at hand is that they actually posted their exploits graphically, online, in a public blog, for the view of all and sundry.

Both people have been interviewed and they both defended their right to continue doing whatever it is that they were doing. Twitter is ablaze with various parties commenting on this.

Nobody really cares about what I have to say but I shall say this.

Those people who think that they are wrong to post their sexual exploits on-line, are walking down a very slippery slope. Regardless of whether we think that what they are engaging in is right or wrong, the main issue at hand is why this has turned out to be such a scandal.

The primary issue that I am concerned with is freedom of speech.

I believe that they have every damn right to do whatever they want to do and to even publish it online for the world to see. The key thing here is that they never did force anyone to actually go view it. Nobody can accidentally stumble upon their content either. Therefore, there is no compulsion from their part for anyone to view it.

Also, they have not gone out to offend anybody’s sensitivities. If your sensitivity is offended by viewing such things – who the hell asked you to go view it in the first place? And if you have viewed it and are offended, the only person that you have to blame for it is yourself. If you need to ritually cleanse your eye-balls after that, it’s your own fault.

I don’t see the difference between this form of freedom of expression and another highly controversial form of freedom of expression – political speech. If these two had been blogging as Locke and Demosthenes, we would probably see things differently. However, there is essentially no difference between the two.

What is more private than a person’s innermost thoughts that are published online? That is how the whole blogging trend started – when some people decided to use the web to keep a log or journal of their private lives. This thing is just a natural progression of that trend.

If we think that they should be censured for publishing their private acts publicly, we should also go around censuring anyone else publishing photos of themselves eating dinner (I know that Malaysians love food). Honestly, what someone chooses to shove down their alimentary tract is private too.

How about photos of them sleeping in their beds?

Honestly speaking, these two have brought no greater harm onto our nation or society as a whole that has not already been done by someone else.

If there is one thing that needs to be blamed for this whole issue, I would put the blame squarely on our voyeuristic culture. We have become a voyeuristic society globally. This is what Youtube has done to us across the world. We’re constantly pushing for more interesting content as our attention spans drop to that of a 3-year old’s. It’s our fault that these two decided to feed that demand.

Personally, I do hope that they keep doing what it is that they are doing – as long as they are mature enough to understand that every action has its consequences. They need to know that there are many out there who would not look on their acts as liberally as I do and may choose to act on that. Also, there may be legal consequences of their actions such as public indecency Laws (archaic), etc.

As for the whole legal mess that this creates, I have no idea how anyone is going to solve it. If they broke some S’porean/M’sian Law, can they be successfully prosecuted for either of it? Jurisdiction is going to be a bitch. That’s a question that I leave to the courts to decide.

Related articles

RM40m Donation

International Money Pile in Cash and Coins
International Money Pile in Cash and Coins (Photo credit: epSos.de)

According to an article in TheStar, “the RM40mil given to Sabah Umno was a political donation, said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak … adding that the political donation was done in a proper and acceptable manner.”

By all means, clear the CM of corruption charges, but please continue to pursue the money – it’s source and destination.

What I don’t get is how a political donation is being treated as a white-washing of the whole affair. It isn’t. Political donations are a form of corruption, particularly large sums, which is why some countries have a legal limit on political donations.

Instead of stopping investigations of the political donation, the relevant authorities should continue to pursue the money, it’s source and where it goes. If the source of money is illegitimate, or if it has broken some international money laundering laws, then, there is definitely some problem somewhere.

Just because the money isn’t for personal use does not mean that it is clean.

If the source of the money is timber license kick-backs as alleged elsewhere, then it doesn’t matter if that money is being funnelled to the political party to build up its war-chest for the coming GE or whether its for the personal use of any specific person – it is still corruption. The corruption happens when the money is kicked-back, regardless of where the money goes.

What must also be investigated is where that money goes. If the money from the political party funds are being channelled to say, companies owned by the CM and/or his family to ostensibly run campaigns, that’s just a round-a-bout way of doing the corruption – a very thinly veiled way to do it, actually.

Some people were probably getting a little too complacent and bold, drunk with all that power and feeling invincible – until their hands got caught in the proverbial cookie jar. Then, they probably had to give up the cookie to someone else, or risk having their hands chopped off.

Anyone who knows how to move that much cash across borders should know better. Large bribes need to be routed through multiple layers and intermediaries, so that it becomes difficult to trace. Unless of course, the once caught were merely intermediaries.

What irks me is how our government, and the PM, is actually treating this case as closed. The message that they are sending out is how one should go about bribing a politician in Malaysia – via their political party donations instead of directly – a very thinly veiled bribe at that.

At the very least, have the decency to hide the damn money.

Sad.

Related articles

Discounting PTPTN

Loan
Loan (Photo credit: Philip Taylor PT)

According to the recently tabled government budget for 2013, amongst the many goodies given out to the young adults is a gem – the discounts being given on PTPTN loans.

PTPTN study loans became a sticking point this year when some groups asked for the writing off of all PTPTN loans and the dismantling of a system that was accused with pushing fresh graduates onto the downward debt spiral. This ensured that the PTPTN issue would become a hot election issue in the coming GE13.

However, I have to tip my hat off to the government for how they chose to handle the issue.

The government announced a one-time 20% discount for those who are able to repay their loans in a lump sum payment and a 10% discount for those who are paying off their loans regularly. When I heard it announced on TV last week, I was shocked by the brazenness of it all.

In one fell swoop, the government ensured that it would collect on a sizeable amount of revenues next year. This much needed income was important as the government was handing out election goodies to almost every segment of the electorate except me. Someone had to pay for it all and PTPTN loans were one way to do it.

According to various numbers, the amount of outstanding PTPTN loans were between RM30-RM48 billion in total. If only a fraction of these people decided to take up the 20% discount to repay their debts in full, we’re talking about collecting billions in revenues next year.

Unfortunately, in the same step, the government has ensured that problems that plague PTPTN in collecting on its loans will continue. Malaysians now know that when the government needs money, they will dole out discounts on everything from traffic summons to student debt. Therefore, there is absolutely no incentive to pay up loans nor debts to the government.

On the other hand, the rakyat are now given the incentive to wait – for Mega Sales! PTPTN defaulters everywhere should learn a lesson from this – to never repay your loans and to force the government to beg for money. This is the wrong message to send. PTPTN can forget about ever collecting any debt again.

What kind of nation are we building up – where one can borrow money from the government, and expect to get huge discounts when the government is in need of cash – a nation of law breakers and free loaders. Personally, I think that this move thoroughly stinks of irresponsible government.

Our PM even had the cheek to comment on the PR’s suggestion to cancel all PTPTN debts. To me, that’s essentially the pot calling the kettle black. Neither action is a responsible one and gives people the incentive to refuse to pay back debts.

Debts must be repaid – in full, and on time!