A complaint to Tiger Air

For our Jogja trip last week, I bought Tiger Air tickets in early Feb 2014 as it had the most competitive price with good flight times. Late Feb 2014, the outbound flight was rescheduled from 1:05pm to 4:15pm. It's still fine although it meant we would have less time to spend in Jogja on the first day.

Late Apr 2014, Tiger Air cancelled the flight altogether, "based on recent network review", and apologized for getting in the way of our travel plans. They said: "we assure you that a full refund for your flight(s) to the original form of payment will be completed within 30 working days." And: "As for your flight refund, we'll take care of the administrative matters and process it as soon we can."

And so I waited

...

And waited

...

And waited.

Trusting Tiger Air knows what it's doing and expecting the fares to be refunded to my credit card without any need to call them demanding what's rightfully mine.

Till this evening when I felt like giving them a call.

I called the hotline, gave my details and was told that now that I've called them, they will start the processing and I need to wait for 3-4 weeks before I get refunded.

Say what??

I should have known that this is coming.

So, Tiger Air decided that the Singapore-Yogyakarta route is not profitable after all, cancelled all the bookings in that route, asked customers to wait for 30 working days for refund. BUT the 30 working days started only when customers make a call - which they never advised.

Why they don't just start the refund process immediately is beyond me. Who in the right mind would not want their money back, I wonder, especially after their travel plans got disrupted?

When asked why they don't advise customers to call them in the notification, the customer service said that email is not part of their job, it's done by another department. Classic.

When asked why the refund process is not automatically started, the customer service said, because they have a lot of bookings so they can not locate the reference number without the customers calling them.

What a joke.

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Update: I finally received the refund from Tiger Air on 11 June 2014. Case closed.