Ordinary Gweilo

It’s easy to get confused about events that happen after midnight (insert your own punchline about eight pints of lager here).

Cable TV try to solve this by extending the 24 hour clock past midnight, so that a football match that kicks off at 2.45 a.m. is announced as taking place at 26:45 the previous day.  At first sight it looks wrong, but actually it can only have one meaning, and I think most people would regard that time as an extension of the evening (rather than early morning the following day), so it’s not as stupid as it may seem.   

There was a letter in the SCMP yesterday (subscription required) about the problems this can cause with flight arrangements.  The correspondent’s elderly Scottish parents had booked a flight on Oasis, and for the return journey they duly arrived at the airport on the date shown on the booking.  Except that the flight had departed about 21 hours earlier – so they had missed it.  Oops.

Understandably they were distraught over the mix-up. I would have hoped that the well-advertised customer service would now have helped with this stressful situation, but I was sadly mistaken.

They were told by the handling agent that, although seats were available, due to company policy they would need to purchase another ticket in order to return home. They asked to speak to an Oasis supervisor and, although several calls were made to Oasis, no representative from the airline came to speak to my parents. The final message that Oasis would not make any exception in their case was delivered by the handling agent.

They were, understandably, devastated by the decision and had no other choice but to purchase two economy tickets and left Hong Kong. What was already a tiring journey had now become much more stressful.

This may seem unfair, but the airline couldn’t re-sell the seats for the flight that the couple had missed, and Oasis is meant to be a low-cost airline.

If the ticket was issued by an agent, it is their responsibility to make the arrangements clear on the paperwork.  If it was purchased through the Oasis website, I think that makes it very clear that the flight departs shortly after midnight.  Personally, if I had relatives staying with me I would check their flight arrangements quite carefully.  Especially if they were elderly.

Having said that, I think Oasis could at least have offered them tickets at a special price – after all, if there were seats available at that time then it wouldn’t have cost them anything to make that concession.